Mailbox Peak

Mailbox Peak is one of those daredevil hikes people go on just to brag about it on social media. 4000 ft of elevation gain in 3 miles (or 6, if you go on the new trail), and there's a colorful mailbox on top that's plastered with a bunch of stickers you can take a picture with. It seems like the kind of thing you'd put on your college bucket list to tackle while you're still young and reckless. I first heard about the trail through seeing a couple ladies I knew post about it on social media-- and my young, reckless college brain vowed to one day trace the steps of those pairs of suave Gore-Tex boots clad in tight yoga pants. (I was and still am a connoisseur of yoga pants and the shapely beings that don them.)

That being said, I wasn't foolish enough to attempt Mailbox Peak during the long, cold, damp rainy season. 4000 ft of elevation gain across 3 miles of unpaved dirt paths and giant boulders is not something you want to tackle when it's barely above freezing and the ground is soaking wet. If I wanted to conquer Mailbox Peak, it would have to be during the summer.

I didn't get the chance to hike on Mailbox Peak until 2 summers after hearing about it. By then, I had already graduated from the University of Washington, and had moved back to my hometown 3 hours south of Seattle. I still kept in touch with my college friends from UW, and decided to plan a weekend hangout last July with my friend Josh. We met through Earth Club during both of our freshman year, and bonded over our mutual nerdiness and niche interest in geography. But despite knowing each other for so long and through an outdoorsy, environment-oriented group, we had never done any outdoor activity or visited anywhere outside of the city of Seattle together. So I thought it'd be cool to visit Josh and go hiking with him, before he moved to the East Coast for grad school, and I started my new full-time job.

To experience the full breadth of the Mailbox Peak experience, we decided it'd be best to go up on the old route and go down on the new route. That way, most of the hard work would involve getting up to the top, while the route down would be nice and easy. It was hot and clear that weekend, so we didn't want to exert ourselves too much in the afternoon. Neither of us had a car we could drive to the trailhead that weekend, but it didn't matter because King County Metro had recently opened a bus + shuttle route (trailheaddirect.org/mailboxpeak) from Bellevue to North Bend, and then directly to the Mailbox Peak trailhead. But neither of us minded, since we were both fans of public transportation, and were fast enough hikers to be able to finish the 10 mile round trip hike in 5-6 hours.

The eponymous mailbox at the trail summit



As we ascended the mountain, my mind drifted back to the college memories that compelled me to put Mailbox Peak on my bucketlist. I wondered why I made Earth Club such an integral part of my college extracurricular experience. I was keenly interested in science and nature at a young age, and became "woke" on climate change after reading a National Geographic article that framed the issue of carbon dioxide emissions as if it was a Scooby-Doo mystery. What were we going to do about our dependence on fossil fuels? How could we transform our lifestyles to reduce our ecological footprint and live in harmony with Mother Nature? These were some of the big questions I remember musing as a ten year old when I had trouble falling asleep.

But at the same time, I was also a nerdy, academically oriented shy kid who was strongly pressured to pursue a career in engineering and tech. My parents both worked in tech as process and software engineers, and I remember constantly being compared with other children of highly educated Asian immigrants. In hindsight I know my parents did that to push me to succeed, but there were a lot of times where I mentally checked out of the "model minority" rat race, and dreamed of being more like the tree-huggers I read about in National Geographic and saw on PBS shows.

So part of me saw college as an opportunity to explore this other side of me that cared about the environment and sustainability and being green. And I saw Earth Club's weekly Wednesday meetings as a way to indulge my inner tree-hugger, learn more about environmental issues and advocacy, and meet interesting people I wouldn't normally interact with outside of Earth Club.

Group picture of UW Earth Club members at the Mt. Rainier National Park, May 2015. Yours truly on the bottom left :)

One thing that surprised me about Earth Club after I joined and got to meet the members wasn't necessarily the culture shock between STEM-oriented, culturally Asian me, and the mostly white, culturally activist rest of the club. It was actually how virtually all of the other nonwhite members were not just Asian, but of Chinese-speaking descent like me. I don't know why this came as such a surprise to me, because UW's student body was and still is disproportionately Asian-American compared to the state's population, and the country as a whole. And I knew Earth Club was a really small club, with only a dozen or so regular members, so it wasn't realistic to expect Earth Club to be a racially diverse organization that evenly reflected the school's racial makeup as a whole. No one joins a club of 13 people expecting there are going to be exactly 9.3 white people, 2.5 Boba Asians, 0.9 Latinos, 0.6 mixed-race, etc.

But even so, it floored me to realize UW Earth Club was pretty much just white people + Chinese-looking Asians. And it made me wonder- why weren't there other visible minority groups represented in Earth Club? Why were the people in the environmentalist movement so overwhelmingly white? Was this an example of East Asians and lighter-skinned visible minorities benefiting from "proximity to whiteness"? Rather than answering my questions about environmentalism and what I could do to make a difference, joining Earth Club presented more questions that I hadn't even thought about before.

I tried not to talk about this too much with Josh; I felt like it would spoil the quiet contemplation wandering through nature allowed us. And I knew he had his own inner monologue of thoughts and memories of UW that he was going through. We did talk about our undergrad experiences at UW and about other topics like social issues, faith and spirituality, and our plans for the future. But Earth Club didn't come up as much, probably because Josh and I didn't really bond through Earth Club.

This brought me back to why the two of us made different decisions on how involved to get in Earth Club. Why did I feel like I'd get more out of joining the club? Was I trying to milk the club for leadership positions that I could put on my resume? One of the other members admitted to me they were involved in Earth Club to put it on their grad school application. Did I subconsciously think it would help me talk to hot girls? Yes... and in hindsight, I'm embarrassed to admit how much my desire to expand my social comfort zone was driven by the possibility of dating the crunchy chicks from Eastside King County.

There's no doubt I could have developed more substantive leadership experiences and formed more satisfying connections by getting involved in different clubs. But as a wise man once said, it is our choices, not our capabilities, that determine who we truly are. And my 19 year old self's stubbornness led me to stick with a club where all the other members were mellow, introverted, and not that outwardly committed to the club. It was sometimes frustrating feeling like I was experiencing the Seattle Freeze through my interactions with the other members. Being in an aloof, quiet social setting full of introverts helped me realize how important it was to have someone who's more assertive and dynamic in a group for balance, and made me realize that sometimes, I needed to be that person in the group.

Nevertheless, getting involved in such a small, laid-back club taught me the value of appreciating the positive aspects of any situation. Earth Club might not have been a super engaging organization where I could make lifelong friends or feel like I was making a big difference on campus, but it was still nice to be able to sit down with a group of like-minded people on the lawn on a nice Wednesday afternoon, vibe together in solitude on an on-campus nature walk, or educate one another on environmental issues. And in some ways, being in a club with lower expectations and lower pressure made it easier for me to overcome my shyness and talk to the group directly when need be.

As we made our way down on the winding new trail, descending into the 90 degree F heat under the blazing hot sun, I remembered the King County Metro shuttle and bus we took to get to the trailhead from Downtown Bellevue. We thought it'd be cool to take public transit to a hiking spot in the Cascades, since it was something we'd never done before and only recently became an option. But beyond the novelty of using an urban public service to access the great outdoors, it was nice to be able to sit back and relax in the air-conditioned comfort of the shuttle. Being the reserved, stoic Pacific Northwesterners we were, we sat back and gazed out the window in mostly contented silence.

On the way back from the trailhead, I saw one of the hikers we encountered on the top of Mailbox Peak ended up taking the same shuttle and the same bus route as us. They had braided hair and were decked out in what appeared to be a sports bra and short athletic shorts- a photogenic outfit for hiking photos. I asked them to take a couple photos of me and Josh while we were on the summit. What were the odds there'd be other people from the trail using the shuttle + bus service to get back home? Maybe taking public transit to a hiking trail in the mountains wasn't so unusual after all. At some point, they noticed we were across from them and asked if they could borrow my portable battery to charge their phone. I couldn't help but notice they brought a T-shirt with them, stashed in their backpack, to put on right before getting off the bus. It almost seemed like a metaphor for the contrast between how we want to be seen on social media, versus how we're seen in real life among close friends and family. And I realized that contrast between how we want to be seen and how people actually see us played a huge role in defining my college experience and how I remembered it. Mailbox Peak helped me come to terms with how I had changed during college, and allowed me to better appreciate being present in the moment- whether shredding your quads on a steep, forested incline, or connecting with the people you have in your life.