60 in 60, Take 23

#23, Cape Falcon, Oswald West State Park (09/27/11)

Mark and I did this hike three weekends ago, but we've been so busy I haven't had time to sit down and write about anything lately. While summer has seemed to mellow a bit for the rest of the country, it has just started in the Pacific Northwest with temperatures well into the 90s. No big deal except for the complete lack of air conditioning, including in our apartment. So to cool off three Saturday's ago, we drove to the Coast {which is always 20 degrees cooler than anywhere else} and hiked the five miles to Cape Falcon.

This hike was littered with salal berries, something I had never heard of until I moved to the PNW. They are edible but I couldn't muster the courage to actually eat one. Even though we met a lady on the trail who taught us how to identify them and then proceeded to eat a bunch in front of us, I wasn't one hundred percent confident they wouldn't actually poison me. I was apparently taught as a child never to eat a wild berry.

The aforementioned lady gave me a leaf from the plant to help me identify these bushes along the trail. That's me, using my leaf to confirm that my berry find was in fact the salal berries.

It didn't matter though. I still never tried one. Instead we went to Cannon Beach for pizza. Then home to our furnace of an apartment.