Help Needed -- Is this a solid stain? What do we do?!?

Hello!

Several years ago, we bought a home with a HUGE deck...practically a dance floor. 🙂 I LOVE it! Unfortunately, though, it had not been cared for properly.

When we bought the place, the deck was covered with a hideous indoor/outdoor carpet that had been GLUED down. Yuck! We removed the carpet ourselves (an incredibly nasty, buggy, filthy job) but hired someone to strip/stain the surface afterwards -- largely because we also had a porch/roof installed over part of the deck at the same time.

The guys who stripped and stained the deck (at that time, still speckled with glue and old reddish-brown stain) used a power washer to clean it. The bare wood looked gorgeous, and when I left for work that morning, it was my understanding that they were going to stain it a light brown. When I came home, though, I found that they had used some sort of dark brown stain/paint. It was too late to do anything about it -- and there were other, more pressing problems with the construction, so we have just been living with the finish since then -- for about three years.

The finish has faded and is starting to wear in places. It doesn't look so great, so we figured that it's now time to strip/stain/reseal it, and we're at a bit of a loss. After doing a bunch of research, I am afraid that those guys used a solid stain or a paint of some sort. What do you think? Will a stripper remove it? Will a power-washer? Will we have to (sigh) sand it?

We feel like we need to move on this before the winter comes, and the days are getting shorter.

Any advice -- where to go from here...what products to use...what equipment we'll need -- would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

(Please forgive the "dead dog" in the photos...they were the most recent I could find.)