A very tough hike

I'm not sure if I have mentioned this in the past, but on Sept 20th, Molly, Josh Y, Linze and I are climbing Mt. St. Helens, in Washington (yes, it's that Mount St. Helens, that volcano that blew its top in the 80s). So, naturally, we've been preparing for it by doing all of these other hikes that I've mentioned since Feb of this year.

Mt. St. Helens is a 8-12 hour hike round trip. You start out early in the morning, and hopefully summit before the clouds roll in too heavily to see anything. Most of our hikes have been 4 hours or less... so we needed to see if there we had the endurance to do a really long one.

Enter Trapper's Creek (not far from Mt. St. Helens, actually). We have a specific hiking book that lists a bunch of hikes by difficulty. We've done 4 of 6 of the hardest rating, and Trapper's Creek was our 5th (next week is the 6th, but Molly's already done it... Cooper's Spur) Trapper's Creek is an 7 hour, 13 mile hike that gains (although slowly) about 3000 ft. elevation which is one of the highest hikes we've done.. and BY FAR the longest.

Once we summitted it started raining, but the entire hike is in old-growth forest. We started the hike at about 10:30 AM, summitted at about 4 PM (maybe, we didn't have a watch) and made it back to the car at just before 7pm. We recalcuated our distance, and it ended up being 14.2 miles.. over half a marathon.

I'm very sore today, and so is Molly.

Speaking of today... it is Molly's first day of school. I sent her flowers, so we'll see how that goes ;)

I'll post pictures of the hike soon.