Pacific Northwest Trip: Day 2

Monday, June 3rd we climbed Mt. St. Helens. We started our journey at 6am (although I woke up at 4:30am from a bad night's sleep!) 

Starting the uphill climb. Down in the forest it was fairly easy going. The snow was compact still early in the morning and we had no idea what laid ahead of us - the top of the mountain doesn't look that far away now does it? 

A couple that we'd see on and off throughout the day took our picture for us. It was about 7AM at this point. We still had no clue how much more intense things were going to get.

Ramin liked this cool area because the terrain was otherwordly. You can see me hiking here. This was the easy peasy stuff!

We rarely took time for pictures because we so intensely focused on what we were doing. This shot is great because it gives you an indication of how far we'd come at that point. The white stuff in the distance are CLOUDS....and we started out in the valley behind the hill just above my head. The toughest climbing was still ahead of us! 

The mountain was still snow covered of course and we had been trekking through it for a while at this point. The day was incredibly nice and so we just wanted to keep going, but we hadn't prepared ourselves for snowy conditions (we'd thought to ourselves that if we got too deep in snow we'd turn back)...so my feet were starting to freeze at this point.

You can see Mt. Hood in the very background of this picture. It was a amazing. I climbed a little bit more from this point before I started realizing that my toes were freezing. I wasn't going to make it to the very top - which was only about a 1/2 mile from here and much more vertical.

I turned around and slid on my butt back down to a meeting point - now THAT was the funnest part of the entire climb! 

Ramin is a trooper and kept climbing. Here is a shot he took of the incline he was climbing to get to the top. 

Here is Ramin's view from the top! You can see Mt. Rainer in the background and if you look close enough you can see steam/smoke coming out of the pit below.

A ridge at the top leads to an image of Mt. Adams

Ramin hung out at the top for a while with a few other people who were kind enough to take his picture. The white stuff on his face is salty sweat 

Ramin's trusty walking stick that someone left for another person to use down at the base. 

This is our last picture after coming back down the mountain...this was the only shot we took because we just wanted to get back down to the bottom.

Overall the entire trip up and down took us 13 hours. We left at 6AM and returned at 7 PM. I stopped climbing up after 5 hours of climbing and Ramin took another 2 hours to climb to the top, hang out and then return to my meeting spot 3/4 of the way up the mountain. While I waited for him I was able to dry out my socks and shoes and pants. I was also able to help some underprepared college guys who were extremely close to getting frostbite and potentially hypothermia.

We signed the book once we were done. Apparently we'd missed seeing some bears that day!

We had planned to stay one more night in our tent but we decided to find a motel instead because we wanted a NICE warm bed for the night