Team Norris: Exhausted

This was a pretty tough weekend. Our friend, Lindsey, decided that she wanted to hike Mt. St. Helens, you know... the Volcano, for her birthday. She laid out the plans, and such, and the first weekend we were all available to do so was this past weekend.

So, I have to say, this has been a very dry September. And, of course, the DAY we hike up the volcano we get more rain than we've had all month.

Friday evening we got everything packed up, soaked a bit in the hot tub, and went to bed early. We made it over to Josh and Lindsey's place at 9:30 am on Saturday morning, and drove to the gorge... specifically, Hood River, OR. Molly and I are members of a wine club called Phelp's Creek which makes some very good, and affordable, Pinot Noirs. Well, it just so happens that on Saturday they were having an "open house" which means that wine club members are invited up to their home/vinyard were we get to talk with the grower and his family and discuss (and drink) their wine, sample next year's wines and eat tasty cheeses and sausage, etc. It was an incredibly fun experience.

Afterward we found some lunch, and headed up to Cougar, WA, which is a small community that has been built up around the hiking tourism for Mt. St. Helens. There is only 1 hotel... called the Lone Fir Resort. I don't know if I would ever describe something like this a resort. More like a set of dingy looking cabins, a restaurant, gift shop and the climber's registry. Molly and I purchased the "cabin" for Lindsey's birthday. It was cosy, and all-in-all, pretty nice, considering the exterior. There was one bedroom with a queen which Lindsey and Josh took, and the hallway had a set of bunk beds in it, which Molly and I took. We ate dinner at the little restaurant, and played some board games and drank a bottle of wine, ate "s'more brownies" and were in bed at about 9pm. Nobody slept that great. The beds were kind of crappy... but we needed to get an early start because, as a group, we are not the fastest hikers.

We got up at 5:30am. I made eggs and sausage in the little kitchen and we had a nice and filling breakfast. We spent the next hour or so getting ready, and we're finally in the car at around 6:45 AM. The trail head for the hike is about 15 miles from the cabin. When we arrived it was cold, wet and overcast. There was a slight drizzle which felt pretty ominous.

The Mt. St. Helens' summit trail is 9 miles round trip, starts at just under 4000 ft elevation and gains 4500 ft elevation in 4.5 miles, to a total elevation of 8365 ft. The first two miles of the trail gains less than 1000 ft elevation, which means that in the last 2.5 miles you gain 3500 ft (over half a mile up, basically). This is a serious hike. Parts of the hike you cross over boulder fields where you have to scramble to get up some of the large rocks. Other parts of the hike involve a very fine scree, which is basically volcanic dust which is not unlike climbing a giant sand dune.

So, at 7:25AM on Sunday morning, we start the hike. We are well prepared, with lots of food, water (over 3 liters per person) and many layers of clothes. Not 5 minutes into the hike we have to stop to strip off some layers of clothes. Then 3 minutes later, we do it again... this continues for the first 2 miles of the trip, until we're practically down to our last layers of clothes.

Once we get to the timberline which is at 4800 ft elevation, we start climbing our first ridge, which is basically a large boulder field. Halfway up, we have to put clothes back on, because it starts misting and the wind is really blowing now that we're out of the cover of the trees. At the top of this ridge it is downright COLD.... and the fog begins to roll in, which makes it extremely difficult to see the large wooden markers that are erected in the bolder field to mark the general direction of the trail. The trail itself is really non-existent, because there is nothing but boulders to climb on... you just have to follow the 15 ft markers on the horizon. The fog is so thick that you can barely see one marker through it. Even at this early stage we decided that if the fog ever got so bad that we couldn't see the next marker, that we would turn back.

At this point we were about an 1 hour, 30 minutes into the hike. The fog was just light enough that we could always just make out the next marker. At this point we started catching up to people that had started before us, and people that had started after us were starting to catch up and pass. Another 30 minutes or so up the ridge and we started meeting people coming back down. They indicated that they HAD NOT summitted, because the fog was too thick and there was 50-60 mph winds up ahead. Some people had mentioned that there was a weather station up near the top of that first ridge, which we were about halfway up at that point. We decided that we should try to make it up to that point, and see how it looked. If nothing else, we would have gone about halfway up the mountain, in terms of distance (not elevation).

There were a few brave souls heading on up, but many were turning back. Ahead of us we could see 2-3 groups climbing up more large boulder fields, and below on the ridge we could see a few more heading our direction, and many heading back. Fifteen minutes later, the fog began to clear up some, and we could see 2 markers or further ahead of us. Not long after that the clouds began clear up, and the sun actually peeked out of the clouds for awhile.... then it got a little warm. So we had to strip off again.

During all of this we would stop regularly to eat power bars and drink water. It was kind of treacherous, because the rocks were wet and the wind was very strong, but I never felt unsafe.

Eventually we made it to the weather station, which consists of an radio transmitter and a solar panel. I assume there were weather instruments somewhere, but I never saw them. There wasn't even a building or anything. We stopped here, in the sun, and tried to shelter ourselves a bit from the wind, which was sporadic, but when it did gust it was very cold. Ahead we could see the beginning of the scree field, but the top of the mountain was still obscured by clouds, so even then, we couldn't get a good idea of what lay ahead. After a short break at the station, we got our hiking poles out and began the tough part of the trek.

This last part of the hike was tough. Lindsey and Josh had to get ahead of us, because Molly has shorter legs and can't keep up in the straight part of the hikes like this. We basically had to take baby steps up, and used the poles to help pull ourselves up this very, very steep part. The further we got the colder it got and the windier it got. There were definitely some scary gusts of wind, but we weren't ever on an "edge" of a mountain to where we had to worry about being blown down something steep. We could still barely make people out ahead of us forging on into the clouds. We had to take a few breaks, and at one point we had to stop to allow Molly to bandage up a blister that she accumulated on her ankle. After that we took one final break for about 3 minutes and started up our final ascent. We couldn't see Josh and Lindsey anymore... or really anybody head of us as the weather started getting worse. We were determined at this point to summit. Occasionally on this snail pace up we would see people coming back down indicating that they HAD summitted and that it wasn't terribly further. The last few hundred feet were treacherous... just like very fine sand. Every step up came back down about half the distance. On some of the rocks we saw very fine ice.

At 4 hours, 35 minutes into our hike, we summitted. At the top, the view was amazing. OK, not really. We were in the middle of a very cold and windy little cloud, and we literally couldn't see a thing except maybe 30 ft in any direction. Lindsey and Josh started down before we made it to the top. They had beat us by about 10 minutes. They had taken maybe 15 steps down from the top when they spotted us almost to the top, so they came back up with us for a minute, then started back down because it was very cold. Molly and I sat down and had somebody take our picture, and we ate a sandwich... then headed down.

Coming down was infinitely easier, of course, but much harder on the muscles and joints. Back down at the weather station we opened a bottle of champagne that Lindsey had brought to drink at the summit (but it was too cold, of course).

We did the entire hike in under 8 hours. Only 25 or so people summitted that day, and we were four of them. We were some of the last to summit, too. On the way down we met very few people who were headed up. The weather cleared up a bit, but not too much.

I had a heart rate monitor on the entire hike to get an idea of how many calories that one could burn doing this type of activity: 5200 calories. My average heart rate was 127 bpm and the maximum was 161 (probably during that last 200 ft up). So, really, not as much cardio as I would have expected, but that could be a testament to all of the exercise that we've been doing.

We didn't take very many pictures, because there wasn't much to see!