A bit behind, hmm?

So, on August 2, I went out with a group to Stillaguamish (in the Cascades) as a warm-up to the following week’s Mt St Helens hike. It was foggy. (Very, very, very, very foggy.) We lost the trail for a bit, as it went off into snow, but our group leader, who is a Hiker Extraordinare, had a GPS and a map and managed to get us back to the trail. Our group leader however had not done this hike before, and as we later discovered, thought his map grid was in kilometers when it was in miles (which explains why he kept saying ‘we’re nearly there’ when we weren’t). It took all day and we, sadly, did not make it to the top. One of our members was left down at the meadows, unable to go further, and we weren’t able to find (or see) the summit after about an hour more of climbing, and so headed back for him. When we headed back, we could see something that we thought might be the summit – if it weren’t so steep. It was at about a ninety-degree angle to the ground, and loomed up out of the fog. The leader said, ‘That’s not a two or low class three…’ (which is what the summit was supposed to be – which means not all that steep but with a little exposure) and the rest of us agreed we were not equipped nor able to scale that. (The true summit was actually a bit west of where we were, but we couldn’t see it for the fog.) I don’t have too many pictures from that excursion, but here is one:

The next week was the Mt St Helens hike, a hike I did last year, but this year I went all the way up to the true summit. After you reach the crater rim, it is about another half mile to the west to the true summit, and there are some dicey bits of scramble to get there. Sadly, my camera was out of commission and I didn’t get any (usable) shots out of it, and had to take it in for cleaning afterwards. I was also unable to take my tripod up to the top. I am not in as much better shape this year as I’d've liked to have been, which is causing me to consider how to improve that this semester (a different topic altogether). On the other hand, the best purchase of the summer was trekking poles: I don’t know how I climbed the ash field without them, and on almost all hikes on the way down, they are a knee-saver.

But it was fun, it was good. I had one of the radios – at least on the way up – and we did some glissading on the way down (sitting down on a snow field and sliding). I hung out with folks I love, and got to know some new ones. In lieu of my own photos, I give you me, at the summit: