Where’s the peanut butter?!

USGS Summit marker, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

On Saturday and Sunday I went with Tanya, Adam, Julie and Shawn to climb Mt. Adams, the second highest mountain in Washington. The trip to the mountain on Saturday was eventful. We decided not to bother getting an early start because our directions said it should only take about 4 hours to get to the trailhead. Ha. It probably took us 8 hours. We stopped for a leisurely lunch in Eatonville at a strange restaurant that had 21 flavors of soft-serve ice cream and sold toe rings from their bathroom. Then one of the forest roads to get to the trailhead (a section of NF-23 just before NF-90) was completely washed out. This was after driving on the roughest road I have ever seen - a dirt road with huge rocks in the way and with most of it only one car wide and so overgrown that bushes were rubbing on both sides of the poor Shawn’s car. So we struggled to find an alternate way to get to the trailhead (since, from where we were our best maps only showed a bunch of dead ends). We finally got to the trailhead maybe some time around 6 and started toward the Lunch Counter where we wanted to camp. The Lunch Counter is at about 9000′, which is supposed to put us in a good position to get to the summit the next day with a pretty leisurely climb of about 3000′ but it got dark way too early and we had to camp just a little above 7000′. Not that we didn’t fumble around in the dark with our headlamps trying to find cairns or trails or anything to get us a little further along.

Then yesterday we rose bright and early (and covered in suffocating ash, which blew right into all of our tents) and climbed the “non-technical” route to the summit. The climb was tough but fun and the views and way down were incredible. Maybe most incredible is that Shawn made it down at all since he started having some terrible IT pain in his left leg on the way down. After stopping to take down our tents we got to the parking lot and on the road at about 8 or 9 and didn’t get back to Seattle till about 3AM. Mad props to Adam and Shawn for getting us back. I was exhausted and not trying to be totally selfish about the trip back but I was thinking about what was ahead of me Monday morning…

Which was the Super Jock ‘n’ Jill half-marathon today at 9AM. I don’t know exactly what my time was and won’t know how I did against my three goals until times come online, but I think I probably made two of the three, which were:

1. Finish better than 1:40
2. Finish in the top 100 overall
3. Finish better than 1:30

My time was somewhere between 1:31 and 1:32 which is shy of 1:30, but about a 7 minute mile pace and I’m happy with that. And I’m very, very tired.