You know when Indiana Jones breaks into the Knights cave in the Last Crusade, and his partner makes a bad decision about which cup to drink from and the knight says, “He chose…poorly”? We chose…poorly. But we’re alive still, so that’s good. Hoping to get a hike in before meeting the rest of our party back at Cape Disappointment, my friend and I headed out to Leadbetter, took a look at the map, and decided to tackle the whole thing: Dune Forest Loop to the Bay View Trail, crossing the wildlife refuge on the Bearberry Trail, then down the shoreline and back in on the Weather Beach trail to connect back with the Dune Forest Loop. It was late morning only 6 miles roundtrip, totally doable. Unfortunately, it was high tide. And this winter has been wet. Leadbetter floods at high tide, and that combined with the recent heavy rains (it had hailed twice the night before) made the trails here more a swamp-wade than an actual walk. At times we were moving through water up to our thighs. But we didn’t realize quite how bad it would be until we were two-thirds of the way down the Bearberry trail, and at that point we figured we’d just tough it out. It was six-of-one, half-dozen of the other, since by the time we got to the west edge of the peninsula, we knew we’d have to re-cross it, and we wanted to complete the loop. Plus we thought it might be a teeny bit higher up further south on Weather Beach. We laughed for most of the walk; as we said, “At least we’re not in the Everglades”. But it did get pretty demoralizing on the last leg of the Dune Forest Loop (a higher trail than Bearberry or Weather Beach), nearly dry, when we hit another section of knee-deep water over the trail. Plus, in the forested areas, the gnats were pretty bad – not biting, just irritating. A definite bout of Type II fun, and luckily we had showers to return to back at the Cape D campsite. The bugs, combined with the distance and the fact that we could have seen most of the sights on trails at Cape Disappointment mean I’m probably not coming back here anytime soon. At least not without waders.