Visit the Washington State Trails Association site and look at trip reports . You can search by area, date range, and trail conditions. There are some trails that won't require snowshoes and won't tax your back.

No guarantees on the weather.

Silver Falls and Grove of the Patriarchs are easy trails from Ohanepecosh campground. However there may not be access at this time of year. For sure you will not be able to get there via Chinook pass.

They don't have winter on the "east coast'?

It's snowshoeing season, not hiking season :) check out snowshoeing trails around crystal mountain

Northern State Mental Hospital

Same with Fort Casey!

So, I don’t know exactly how it works now but when I was a student in Oly, the US Forest Service could hire students non-competitively. I went to the Olympic National Forest HQ and asked about student employment. They set me up on contracts doing fish surveys and literature research. It was enough to pay for school, it gave me some college credit for the job experience, and I built a network to grow from over the years. Best luck and thank you for your interest in ecology.

I think it's more like 20 miles and 6k of very, and that's not for me 😃

I live in Olympia actually haha! I mentioned in the post that I am going back to school but it’ll have to wait about a year. I started looking into DNR and the Department of Ecology yesterday, definitely some good stuff. Thank you for the info!!

This is maddening.

Link to the website for anyone looking for more info: https://www.cedarcreekgristmill.org/

I'd like to think those are Larches, but I suspect they are dead evergreens.

Hey, my home town!

I mean the alternative is to organize a shuttle, wake up stupid early, and hike 18.5 miles and 4.5k of vert in day including some slow going scrambling over a boulder field and Asgard pass. Not impossible if you’re fit, but not an easy day even if you are

That none of us can get a permit for 😃. We'll see how the lottery goes again this year. I'll get there!

Early this past Sunday. It was cold, but there was open sky to be found.

Well technically the original poster did say ‘that’ time of year and not ‘this’ time of year 🤓

Washington is outrageous

Something tells me you didn’t take this today.

I’ve heard that place is pretty sketchy behind the scenes. Old rumors, so maybe it’s better now?

DNR and DFW are definite starting points. You might not even need a degree for some of their seasonal gigs. But don’t forget about Dept of Ecology, too.

If you move down to Olympia, you could also go to school at Evergreen. They have a lot of course offerings that intersect with your interests, and they’re fantastic for working, non-traditional college students. And cheap.

Evergreen isn’t for everybody, but it’s definitely worth looking into.

Good luck! I have faith that you’ll find work that you enjoy, because you’re clearly being strategic about getting there.

TLDR: don’t wait until you have a degree to start angling toward the field you want to work in. You can take steps now.

Too much foot traffic

You can just feel the racism.

Exactly. Plus the thugs in blue be being using them to steal our cars and put all of us in jail so hard. Jail so hard. Plus, towing companies make more than social workers when they impound your car and crush it into garbage if you don't empty your bank accounts and give them all of your money. All of your money. The Seattle subreddit has a good post yesterday about how they be. Lincoln Towing is the CONservative devil.

The Enchantments. Not an easy hike.

https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/enchantment-lakes