The Seiko Alpinist’s Natural Habitat

Affiliate disclaimer! Just about every link to an Amazon product page or any other e-commerce platform is an affiliate link, from which I’ll get a commission of the sale should you choose to buy it. You still pay the same price, so it just makes it a win-win for the both of us. I just have to legally disclose this!

Day 1: In Pursuit of Zeus

It was another one of those pesky, early morning flights. After quickly shutting up my alarm, I gathered all my things I had intelligently packed the night before and bolted out the door for the airport. It was a Monday morning and there was a surprisingly long line at the TSA Precheck queue at 5 AM. Yet more surprising was the fair amount of businesspeople taking the opportunity in line to wind their mechanical timepieces, as I myself also did. Despite the line, I found my way through security in about 20 minutes and got to my gate just before my flight began boarding. I took the opportunity to snap a quick role-call photo of the Alpinist:

The biggest advantage of 6:20AM flights is that they’re almost always on time. Today proved no different as we were soon wheels up and bound for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. After an uneventful hop over to the PNW, my dad promptly came to pick me up, and soon my parents and I were underway to the Olympic peninsula. Our first stop was Olympic National Park’s Hurricane Ridge visitor center…or at least the temporary installment after the real one burned down in May 2023.

Even after spending a couple hours atop Hurricane Ridge, we soon realized there was still enough daylight left in the day to squeeze in one more activity. One quick conversation with a park ranger later, we meandered our way up the Elwha River to Madison Creek Falls. And when in Rome, why not take advantage of the river to show off the Alpinist’s 200M of water resistance?

There remained certainly not enough daylight for anything else after that. We beelined it straight for that night’s abode, the Ocean Star Inn, and soon fell unconscious.

Day 2: Into the Woods

We love slow mornings. After indulging in one the next day, we took our time driving along the scenic US 101 through such features as Lake Crescent, the salmon cascades (sadly no fish, to my dismay) and the quaint town of Forks, WA. The main objective for the day was to take in all the sights and sounds of the Hoh Rainforest. Thankfully, conditions were not so rainy that day.

Tangential point: I am an avid consumer of coffee and caffeine, and I was very surprised to experience that even the smallest of towns in WA like Forks and Sequim (where we stayed overnight) had some of the nicest and most well-thought out coffee shops I had ever experienced! Fueled up on caffeine, we ventured along the Upper Hoh Road to the rainforest. Upon arrival, the visitor center was closed (closed visitor centers seemed to be a theme during our time at Olympic NP), but the trails were not and oh my were they fantastic!

Plenty of enormous, moss-covered trees and all other sorts of forest greenery abounded. My green Alpinist and the aftermarket green strap felt especially at home here. Occasionally the sun would peek through the canopy and cause very visible beams of light to cascade onto the forest floor (pictured on the center, sort of). After no shortage of photos and rubbernecking upwards, we began the drive back to Sequim. It was surprisingly much longer of a drive than we anticipated, and the day was thoroughly spent upon our return. We retired for the night, satisfied with the day’s spoils.

Day 3: Cruising

We originally planned on going whale watching on day 3, but after groaning at the prices and reminiscing about my very unpleasant bout of seasickness I had the last time I went on one, we decided to skip it. We took a morning walk along the shore at Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge instead, hoping to catch cheap sights of whales there. But alas, no whales.

The rest of the day was a transit day. We ended up spending way too much time at Port Townsend waiting for the ferry after just barely missing the cutoff for one. Thankfully it was a rather interesting and pretty little coastal town, and we enjoyed a shockingly delicious Chinese restaurant that is now enshrined in my top 5 Chinese restaurants of all time. We finally made it on the ferry over to Whidbey Island, which, to my surprise, yielded quite a scenic thoroughfare featuring specialties like Fort Casey and Deception Pass State Park.

If there was one slight annoyance with the Alpinist I experienced on this trip, it was that by this point I had to reset the time as mine had a tendency to run about +25 seconds per day. But at a cool $725 RRP, no one promised chronometre performance with the Alpinist, and I am ok with that. We made no further stops on our way to Burlington, WA where we called it an early night in preparation for our excursion into North Cascades National Park the next day.

Day 4: North! Cascades!

When I was researching what to do in the PNW, I for the love of me couldn’t figure out why everyone raved about Mount Rainier NP and relegated North Cascades NP to second fiddle when every picture on the internet seemed to signal the opposite. So we made a gamble and committed to North Cascades, and I believe it paid out the dividends. After a brief stop at the visitor center, which was not closed, we wound our way up to the Diablo Lake overlook, which offered a nice panorama of the environs.

As if that didn’t inject enough joy, we spontaneously decided to hike down to the Ross Lake Dam, which in addition to being a beautiful area, also offered an opportunity to separate ourselves from the crowds. It was vertigo-inducing to look down over the railing!

I want to say we were pretty vacationed out at this point. We still had to make it down to Seattle that evening so we wasted no time scuttling back down to the interstate 5 junction, where after a quick coffee stop (at yet another impressive shop!), we begun our last leg to the Sound. The sudden traffic and urbanisms of Seattle felt alien to us at first, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to suggest at least making a stop at Kerry Park to get a glimpse of the skyline before closing out our PNW trip.

And so went another visit to our nation’s Pacific Northwest. From lush rainforests to cascading waterways, and all in the crisp late summer air no less, my emerald green dial Alpinist was the natural choice for horological accompaniment. Hopefully by the time you’re reading this, fall will have come upon us. And if my initial calculations about the Alpinist being a strap monster were correct, I should have swapped the green rubber strap for a brown leather one. Perhaps a fall foliage trip will be in the works? Anything’s possible with this chameleon of a watch.

If you want to pick up and go on adventures with your own Alpinist, use my affiliate link here! Again, no extra cost to you, it just helps me continue creating content like this!