Tatoosh

My mother recently wrote to me asking about the Tatoosh range in Washington. It is a few miles to the south of Mt. Rainier, separated by a valley with waterfalls, lakes and the headwaters of the Nisqually and Paradise Rivers. The range has over a half dozen peaks, all around 6000ft. Pinnacle, Denman, Plummer, Lane, Eagle and Chutla peaks are the more prominent ones, and The Castle. All these pictures were taken looking south from Paradise. Mt Adams can be seen on the horizon in a few of the pictures.

I have seen it many times, but have only been there once. I hope to change that in the future. The Tatoosh range is in the background of many of the pictures, but should be easy to identify.

The next three pictures were taken on a training trip to the Nisqually Glacier in June 06.

This picture was taken on a Snowshoeing trip in December 05. It was a perfectly clear day, with crisp temperatures and nothing but a light breeze all day.

This picture was taken the next day on an attempt at reaching Camp Muir. It was still clear, but we had to face strong winds with a nasty wind chill before turning back. Mt Adams is on the horizon on the left, and Mt. St. Helens on the right.

These two were taken on the Muir Snowfield on my third attempt at Camp Muir, when I finally made it in June 06.

This is the only trip that I've actually made to the Tatoosh. The picture is of Me and Josh at the crest of the ridge near Chutla Peak. We thought it was Chutla peak, but we couldn't see much at the time.

R&R Olympics Hike

My wife thought that I needed a new post here. So she posted these pictures for me, practically forcing me to write something new. It will have to be all about the pictures, because i hardly even do anything at work and have spent 99% of the last 3 weeks in a 1 square mile area, and the 1% hasn't been much further. It's quite boring and I'd like to do something else soon. Like this...

The first weekend in February I was still on leave and realized the Super Bowl was coming up soon. So I called Daniel and we both agreed that spending an afternoon and evening hiking through the rain, sleet and snow in the woods near a lake would be a wonderful way to spend Super Bowl Sunday. After some discussion, we decided to drive in the direction of the Olympics and see what happened.

I decided we should visit the Lake Cushman area, because I'd never been there before. The weather was great for hiking. It snowed some, rained a bit and did nothing for a while. We saw some very pretty cloud formations at dusk. The lake was very peaceful and very gray. If I'd had more time, it would have been a great weekend to go camping.

Mud and Music

It has rained for the past two nights, and most of the area is covered in think, sticky, gluey mud. Whenever I walk in it, it gets stuck in the tread and around the edges of my boots. Small rocks will often stick to the mud on my boots until I scrape them off on something, or if I’m walking in gravel, every step will fling rocks behind me. This is perfect mud for flinging and driving my Xterra through, but it’s horrible for living in. The drainage is so bad that it takes 3-4 days without rain for the mud to dry up. It the mean time it’s everywhere. I have to take my boots off as soon as I get in my room to keep it clean, and I try to avoid leaving my room so I don’t have to deal with mud. At work, it’s unavoidable. My job takes me to all the muddiest places on the base. My HMMV is filthy because I’ve had to get inside it many times with half an inch (no joke) of mud caked on my boots.

When it first started to rain, I had a great time driving through the dirt areas of the base in my HMMV. It was part of my job, and I thought I was immune to the mud and rain. It would drift a bit, but I was in an open area and had plenty of room. As it rained more, the mud got worse and the turret started to leak on me. At about midnight, I parked the truck a few feet from a ditch to wait, and I put it in park, I felt the vehicle shift. I decided that wasn’t the place to be, and put the truck in drive and tried to get away, but the weight of the vehicle sunk down into the ditch until I was stuck, passenger side down at a 30-40 degree angle. The door on an armored HMMV weights several hundred pounds so if I wanted out my only option was to crawl out through the turret hatch. I had two radios, but my only contact on one was unavailable, and I was trying to avoid calling my own unit on the other and telling them I’d gotten stuck in a HMMV. A few people stopped by to see how I was, but it was 20 minutes before someone came that could help. They had an armored vehicle with a winch and were able to pull it out. I looked in the ditch and saw that my front right tire had been 8 inches deep in the bottom of the ditch. The right side of the truck also took a thorn bush out with it, and I left it there for more of the night. In the morning I had to get rid of the evidence so no one would ask me how it got there. The right side of the vehicle was dirtier than the left, but I could just blame that on the mud. I had friends that could have gotten me out, but it would have taken some more time.

Since I’ve been back from leave and developing a routine, I’ve started to work out more. Normally I like to run outside, but I do my workouts at the end of my shift at night, so I’d need a light to run at night, which I didn’t have for a while. When I went to the gym, I found that treadmills can be pretty boring. There’s just nothing to but stay there and tread and count the time until my programmed exertion is over. At least running outside there is the change of scenery and it actually seems like I am moving. To solve this problem I decided to do what everyone else was doing and buy an armband for my ipod. Yesterday I went to the gym with my ipod proudly strapped to my bicep, turned up the Relient K and found out that ipods have much in common with alcohol. Not only did it lower my inhibitions and ability to make wise decisions, I just couldn’t stop. I spent about 20 minutes more in the gym than I had planned, and that’s a lot for me.

I’ve never had too much to drink in a public place, but I imagine if I did someone might come up to me and want to hang out or something. Having lost the ability to make good decisions, I’d say “Sure, that a great idea”

So this yesterday I was just there in the gym, minding my own business when the cross country skiing machine caught my attention and asked me to come run with her at her pace. Normally I would have declined but me and my ipod said, “Sure, that’s a great idea, we’ll run at your pace, and then even faster” Or something like that.

The end result was the same. I woke up in the afternoon sore, and asked myself “What was I thinking?” At least I’ll get something out of this though. I’m taking the morning off today, but tomorrow I’ll be back, and maybe the Stairmaster will be there too.