In August of 2022 I spent ten days in and near Seattle, for two big events that were happening on different weekends. One of these was a Spartan Beast obstacle race, happening on Saturday the 13th, and other was a music festival, Bass Canyon, which would last from the 19th through the 21st.

I had a friend living near Seattle who I hadn't seen in a few years, who regularly goes to festivals at the Gorge Amphitheatre, a few hours east of Seattle in the rural middle of Washington state. She invited me up there to join her fest fam at either Beyond Wonderland or Bass Canyon. That first one looked more appealing to me, but it was the weekend right before Electric Forest and would've been too out of the way for the plans I was making--that weekend I ended up going to Sonic Bloom instead. So I decided to go with Bass Canyon even though I wasn't too familiar with the sort of music that I'd be hearing there.

In June of that year I'd also done two Spartan Races, a five-mile Super and a three-mile Sprint, in Colorado Springs. To get a Trifecta I'd also need to do a 13-mile Beast with the same year. Once I found there would be one in the Seattle area only a week before Bass Canyon, I knew I would have to do that one, and plan a trip around these two big events and the week spanning the space between them.

Friday, August 12, 2022

As with the previous year's Hulaween trip, I wanted to get to Seattle and back using direct flights with no layovers. Friday's flight was from Albuquerque to Seattle on Alaska Airlines. I arrived at the airport comfortably on time and it was a pretty uneventful flight.

During the flight I brought a book to read, which I had acquired almost exactly a year earlier in Philadelphia: Autumn of the Black Snake: George Washington, Mad Anthony Wayne, and the Invasion that Opened the West by William Hogeland. This is about the most important forgotten war in United States history, waged against Native American nations in what is now the Midwest. Forgotten, because I don't remember it ever being mentioned in any history class I've ever been in; if it was, it was probably just mentioned once in passing. Important, because it's the very reason this country has a full-time active military and not just a militia that raises up during wartime.

After I landed at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, with some time before the baggage started rolling onto the conveyor belt, I stopped for dinner at a place called Sourced where I had a Korean BBQ chicken sandwich.

I also had a vehicle to pick up, but it wasn't a rental car. The friend I mentioned before, who I'd be meeting again in a week, had gone on a short trip of her own and left her car for me to borrow at the airport. I claimed the key at the office at long-term parking. The vehicle was an SUV, much larger than the compact car I'm used to, and it had a rear-facing child seat installed in the back. Well, I sure feel like a real grown-up now, I thought as I drove out of the garage and began the drive to Seattle.

The place where I was staying all week would be the Green Tortoise Hostel, at 1st and Pike. I left the car in a parking garage a couple blocks away and walked there. This is definitely a place I'll recommend, if you are looking to stay in a hostel. You'll see why over the next few nights. I didn't see much of the place Friday night, just checked in, bought a lock for the locker under the bed--I misplaced the one I got in Berlin during the confusion of moving back to the US from Germany--and fell asleep in my bottom bunk bed.

Saturday, August 13, 2022

Today's main event was going to be the Spartan Beast, the grueling obstacle race with half-marathon length. I would need to eat a huge breakfast to fuel up, and the hostel had quite enough for that.

Walk right outside the hostel, and one of Seattle's most famous sights is right down the street:

Pike Place Market is one of the most recognizable places in this city. Usually it's bustling with activity, but this early on a Saturday morning...

...there wasn't a whole lot open yet.

One place that was open was a coffee place on the lower level, called Ghost Alley Espresso. There I got an Americano which was delicious. It's Seattle so of course the coffee is going to be a cut above most anywhere else.

I always have two cups of coffee in the morning, so for the second one I got an oat milk latte at Local Coffee Spot. And because that wasn't enough, I got a third, a light roast, from Seattle Coffee Works.

Now that I was more-than-sufficiently caffeinated, I made my way to the parking garage, got into my borrowed SUV, and started the drive north to Snohomish for the Spartan Beast. It wasn't too far of a drive.

I'd been through five Spartan Beasts before this one, and the obstacles weren't all that different this time.

• Climbing Walls: The simplest obstacle you're going to find here, wooden walls you have to climb over. There's always at least two. The first one is always the easiest at six feet, the next ones are taller and I usually need someone to give me a boost for them.
• The Dunk Wall: Hold your breath, immerse yourself in cold, muddy water, and crawl under a wooden wall.
• Barbed Wire: Another classic obstacle, crawl for a certain distance under all these low-strung lines of barbed wire.
• Bucket Carry: Pick up a big, heavy bucket full of rocks, carry it up a hill and back down again.
• Multi-Rig: This is one that I can never complete, because it requires quite a lot of grip strength. You have to swing from one end of the rig to another, holding onto things like rings and blocks that are hanging from the top. I always end up falling off less than halfway through.
• Z-Walls: There are these walls, each with two corners in them, so from above they look like Z's. They have wood blocks on them to be used as handholds and footholds. You have to climb horizontally from one end of one wall to the other end, the whole time. Sometimes I can do this and sometimes I can't, and I don't remember if I could this time.
• Herc Hoist: This involves heavy sandbags attached to long ropes which are held high up on pulleys on top of a metal frame. So you pull down on a rope to lift up a sandbag, and you're supposed to lift it all the way to the top.
• Atlas Carry: I can do this, but it's seriously energy-draining. Pick up an extremely heavy cement ball, carry it a few meters away and back again without dropping it.
• Rope Climb: Exactly what it says it is. Never been able to do this in nearly a decade of doing Spartans. Someday I'm gonna climb a rope.
• Vertical Cargo: Climb up a cargo net, swing yourself over the rig at the top, then climb back down. Pretty easy compared to a lot of these others.

I finished the Beast in 5:02:52. Before Seattle, my last Beast was in Indiana in 2018, misleadingly named "Chicago Beast" even though it was closer to Indianapolis, and my now-forgotten time was closer to six hours, so I improved on that by about an hour. That's still not quite as good as my time in the 2017 Ontario Beast, which I finished in 4:55:50.

The drive back to Seattle from Snohomish took longer than going the other direction in the morning, since there was a little bit of a traffic jam on southbound Interstate 5.

Downtown Seattle seen from the north on I-5 while stuck in traffic.

Back at the Green Tortoise Hostel that night, they had an event going on there which really demonstrates why I love hostels, and particularly this one. Saturday night was their weekly karaoke night, and they were serving up free beer out of a keg. The karaoke was provided through YouTube; the big screen TV and sound system were connected to a laptop computer on which we simply looked up karaoke versions of songs on YouTube. Thus at the end of each song, there would be a bunch of links to "related videos" which were more karaoke songs, giving everyone ideas of what to sing next. In between six cups of beer, I remember I sang Bush "Machinehead" and Snow Patrol "Chasing Cars" along with at least two or three others.

Sunday, August 14, 2022

After the hostel breakfast, my first destination of the day was going to be, of all places, Starbucks. Not just any Starbucks, though, this was a Starbucks Reserve. I'd heard about this small upscale chain that Starbucks operates since the year before. There's one in Manhattan in New York City which I wanted to visit during one of my weekends there the year before, but just didn't get around to. The place is on Pike Street, but a bit of a walk from the Green Tortoise Hostel. I got an uncommon kind of coffee called Peru Cajamarca. Pretty good; I'll recommend the place to any coffee snobs that find ordinary Starbucks unsatisfying. There's only a few more locations in a handful of big cities and I'll have to hit them up too whenever I pass through.

On the way to Pioneer Square for the day's first event, I stopped at Cherry Street Coffee for my second cup of the morning, a mocha. What was most memorable about Cherry Street Coffee was this hilarious poster I saw near the restrooms.

I actually saw this recently on some humor subreddit; I can't remember if it was r/funny or r/funnysigns or something else.

Next up was one of the tours I wanted to do here, the Beneath the Streets tour. I actually got a $3 discount, thanks to a coupon I got at the hostel. Beneath the Streets operates three tours, and the one I was doing was the Underground History tour. It seems that after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, the area around Pioneer Square was rebuilt, but with the streets an entire story higher than before. This made all the buildings' first floors into basements, the second floors became the new first, and so on. This also necessitated the construction of new sidewalks between the streets and the buildings, turning the original sidewalks into underground tunnels. Beneath the Streets does tours of these spaces which have been left intact and preserved. They're not all connected, though, with the heavy supports holding up the raised streets being in the way, so we had to go up and down through several different entrances and exits to visit them all.

This was pretty worthwhile. You learn a bit about the history of this part of the city and what the underground areas were used for through the years.

The kitchen in Merchant's Café, where I wanted to have lunch, was closed, so following someone's recommendation, I went to McCoy's Firehouse Bar & Grill at 2nd & Washington. For lunch I had a cod sandwich with provolone and coleslaw, as well as a 50cl glass of Hofbräu because they also had a great beer selection along with the seafood.

The next place I wanted to visit, the Smith Tower, wasn't opening until three, so to kill the time, first I walked around the International District a bit. There were some nice looking restaurants, but not being hungry I had no reason to stop at any of them. There was also a light rail station there, near the Lumen Field stadium, and I thought I could ride the train north to Smith tower. I paid for a ticket, but the train never showed for as long as I stood there.

I must have waited for at least ten minutes. At first I was the only person waiting there, but soon it filled up with soccer fans leaving Lumen Field, where an OL Reign game just wrapped up. After I got bored with waiting for the train I just decided to walk to my next destination.

The Smith Tower, when it was built in 1914, was the tallest building in Seattle. Wikipedia says it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River until 1931 when Kansas City's Power & Light Building claimed that title, but after that it was still the tallest building on the West Coast until Seattle's iconic Space Needle was finished in 1962. Two other buildings downtown have since surpassed both Smith Tower and the Space Needle.

I don't know why I never thought to take a picture of the tower. I did, however, take a picture of this century-old photo of the building back when it still was the tallest building in Seattle.

While most of the Smith Tower is an office building, there are certain floors for tourists to walk through and look through some rooms dressed up to look like the 1920s.

While the elevators are modernized and no longer require operators, they still have the vintage levers and wheels left over from back in the day.

On the building's top floor is a bar with a Prohibition-era speakeasy theme. First I got an Emerald City cocktail, made with Roku Japanese gin, Basil simple syrup, lime, Prosecco, and absinthe rinse. Along with that I had a bit of a fancy snack, som tam which was green papaya, tomatoes, fish sauce, lime, peanuts, and herbs and greens.

You can get a great view from the top of the tower.

Looking south, you can see Lumen Field, the stadium which is mostly known for being the home of the NFL's Seattle Seahawks and MLS's Seattle Sounders, but also hosts the NWSL's OL Reign--the women's soccer team formerly known as the Seattle Reign--and most recently the XFL's Seattle Sea Dragons. Behind that you can see the baseball stadium T-Mobile Park, home of the Seattle Mariners. I like how these stadiums are right here in the city and not in the middle of a concrete sea. On the left, with the clock tower, is the city's main train station, King Street Station, which I'd briefly visited a little while earlier during my wandering around the International District.

This is Seattle's current tallest building, Columbia Center.

Before leaving I had another one of their old-timey cocktails, a Citrus Garden, made with Real McCoy rum, Amaro Montenegro, lemon, and absinthe rinse.

While walking back to the hostel I passed by many coffee shops, but unfortunately they were all closed. This city has so many places to get great coffee, but they all close down early in the afternoon. Thankfully I could get some coffee at the hostel.

While sipping on coffee in the hostel's dining room, I was making plans for later in the week. At one point during this trip I wanted to visit Olympia, the capital of Washington, and take a picture of the state capitol building because I'm on a mission to do that in every state. Also, after seeing that train station and wishing I could be using that to reach the city instead of the airport, I really wanted to ride the Amtrak Cascades. So I pulled out my phone and looked at the schedules, and then bought myself round-trip tickets going to Olympia on Wednesday morning and coming back that afternoon.

Finally, after dinner at the hostel, there's one kind of establishment I always try to find in every city I visit, an Irish pub. There was one, Blarney Stone, just a few steps away from the hostel on 1st Street. After the requisite pint of Guinness, I had a Hefeweizen made by Portland-based Widmer Brothers which I thought tasted a lot like a Blue Moon. I also had a Modelo, and finally a Rainier. That last one is what I call a legacy beer, an American brew that has been around for over a century, and I've been trying to drink as many of these, other than Bud/Miller/Coors as I can. Rainier, I thought, was in the same league as Natty Boh and PBR; not bad at all but could be a little better.