I wake to the sound of car doors closing, check my watch: 6:15am. We are late. I hurriedly pack my stuff and grab the guys and we make a quick breakdown. That's when we realize: we've no water. Between the three of us, about two and a quarter liter. Well, that won't do at all, and there are no facilities around us to get water. But alas, eureka! There is snow in them thar' hills, and therefore there must be water, we naively thought.
So, caution into the wind, we head out and put tread to trail, with three-quarter liter apiece. No problem, I said, we will stop at the first stream we cross, and the second and third if necessary, for I thought if this was anything like Glacier, there will be too much water for us. Well, the entire mountain is made of pumice and sand. That's it. Imagine trying to get water out of a sandcastle and a rock. Well, it wasn't happening. So we packed snow into our water bladders, and hoped that our hiking and sloshing around will help melt some more water into our systems. Which it did, but in no where near the needed quantities...but that was a problem for later.
So we start up the mountain proper, and we realize we are second-in-line on trail for the summit...easy pickings for men the likes of us. We quickly pass our neighbors in front of us (they are from Portland, so they are practically locals. Again, useful later). So we make our way up into the clouds...before we were in open space and could see Mt. Rainer and the other surrounding peaks, but now we are quickly being shrouded in a cold, wet, white blanket of fog. As the fog thickens, the temps drop, and as the air thins, the temps drop faster, and the wind picks up, at which point the temps drop even more (do you get the picture yet? IT GETS COLD). The trail markers--8 ft. tall wooden posts located every 100+ feet or so--become hard to follow, then impossible. We meander in the whiteness until a post is spotted, head to it, and meander again. Then, a possible sign of hope. We find a seismic station. At this point, we throw on a few more layers (I still go in shorts, the most telling sign of a fat-man, shorts in a snowstorm), we eat a bit, and have no idea where to proceed from here.
Along comes the Portlanders, who give us some beta on the trail ahead, and they take their much needed rest and recuperation before their final push. We move on. the rock fields drop away below us and we climb what could only loosely be called a scree field. Anyone who has hiked above treeline in the west knows what a real scree field is, and is not it. This is sand. Lots of sand, as a matter of fact, Mt. St. Helen's is probably the Nation's largest sand hill. The going got tough, and the tough got slow and winded. The cold mist and driving wind did not help either. Being low (or out, in my case) on water did not help, as well. But we trudged on, one foot in front of the other, and suddenly, although we could not prove it through any amount of visual evidence--visibility was 25' at best--we were on the rim.
It was, well, intense. The landscape dropped away from us on all sides, the wind bore into us at a bracing 60mph, and frost was forming on the edges of my facial hair (which had long since lost its "goatee" definition, and was now on its way to an odd beard-goat hybrid). We all knew there was only one thing to do: take video.
As the cameras came out, it became one more of those things where we all realized it was a perfect opportunity for something, but only one of us had the words to describe it. Here is my video on youtube.com:
We made quick work of the sand hill below us. Running at full speed, one can make it down in minutes the same mountain that took over an hour to come up. Soon we had passed our Portland counterparts, and were back in the white-out rock fields. Halfway down, no one knows if we are on trail or not. Footprints are rare and scattered, which is no help because most of the trail is on rock anyhow. Then I hear voices way to my left, and, thinking they were coming up a snowfield, I decided to investigate and see how their trek was fairing. But, after a minute or so, it became evident that they were not on the snow, but on a trail a hundred yards from us on the other side of the snowfield. We had somehow placed a large snowbank between us and the trail! Some sly footwork and a few close calls later, we were on our way back to the car on the main trail once again.
By the time we got to the car, it was raining in almost full force, at noon. (oh yeah, it seems my watch was still an hour ahead, and we started at 5:30, not 6:30...oops). And it did not stop raining, even as we arrived at our campsite in southern Oregon at almost midnight. At which point, the mosquitoes were as thick as the rain, and we made camp and fell asleep quickly.
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