Mount St Helens

Sunday, May 26th, was the day officially selected to hike up Mount St Helens, the famous national volcanic monument. For those people reading this who would like to hike up Mount St. Helens one day, here is some advice:

Wear sturdy shoes.
Take food and water with you.

I base this advice on our own experience. We were woefully under-dressed. In fact, one of our party (I won't say who) was wearing sneakers. And while we had two bottles of water between the three of us, we were even weaker in the food department: our food supply for the entire day consisted of a ham sandwich and a box of Cheez-Its. But it's the spirit that counts, and we had that aplenty.

Despite the best intentions, we started pretty late, and then stopped by to have breakfast, so that by the time we were approaching the observation deck at Mount St Helens (where the hike begins) it was getting to be 11:30am. We stopped by on the way up and I took these pictures (in the photo on the right you can actually see the fallen trees from when the volcano erupted):

When we went and asked the park rangers about hiking, they looked us up and down, saw our level of preparation, saw the time, and said "Are you sure?" When we said we were, they told us that it was 19 miles. On rugged terrain. They gave us a map, and told us that it might not be very easy to follow. Being brave souls, we decided to go for it. It was 12:15pm.

When we started our hike, Vepa informed us that the reason why he had not insisted on better preparation was that he'd been quietly hoping that they would see the way were dressed, the amount of food we had, and the lateness of the time, and wouldn't let us go. But they let us go, so now here we were, on our way, not quite sure what to expect.

The hike starts on the observation deck, which is on a mountain some distance away from the volcano, so our hike consisted of coming down the mountain, walking along the plain, and then climbing up the volcano, for as long as we could go. The views on the way down were very stark, and the volcano itself was covered in clouds. The trail was mostly clear, but there was intermittent snow, and these little bits were slippery. We were a little bit surprised that there wasn't anyone else either coming down or up. But we ploughed on.

At a certain point, the trail seemed to disappear. My first thought was, "Hurray! We're done!" But then more rational though kicked in: we'd only been going for 45 minutes, and had probably covered about a mile. So what happened to the trail? On closer observation, it emerged that there was a trail, it had just become really thin: about 6 inches to a foot wide. It was on the side of a steep mountain, with nothing to hold on to, and no end in sight. We decided to try it out.

That stretch on the ledge (about 3/4 of a mile long) was by far the most dangerous on the entire hike. One wrong step and there was a fall down a steep mountain, about 2000 feet down. Plus, walking on it made one slightly dizzy. The picture on the left is misleading, because it makes it seem like the side of the mountain wasn't as steep as it really was. But you can still see the trail disappear behind Vepa.

All the while, I kept wondering what would happen if there was someone coming from the other side: there was hardly enough space for one person to pass through! We treaded precariously, met no one coming the other way, and made it to the other side.

"The other side" consisted of the normal: visible trail, and intermittent slippery snow. As we kept coming down, there was less and less snow, and all we had to do was follow the wooden post markers. By this time, the cloud cover was lifting from the volcano, and we got some nice views. I took the picture on the left, as well as the one at the top of this page.

As we came down, the trail disappeared into just flat, brown plain, and we kept following markers, and kept feeling good about our progress. Still, we hadn't met a single soul on the way. No animals, nothing.

As we kept going, our objectives changed. When we had first started, we'd decided that we would keep going until 2:30pm, and then turn back. But now, as it was becoming clearer that we were making good progress, our ambition began to show: we would go until 3:30pm, or until we reached so-and-so point on the trail, etc.

As our hike continued through the stark terrain, and we began approaching the volcano, our ambition started taking a back seat, as it became apparent that we wouldn't be able to make it to the waterfall (our target) and would have to turn back pretty soon. It was already 3:30pm. Our hike had lasted three hours. We were tired, and it would take us longer to get back up than it had taken to get down. We only had another four hours of daylight. We had to decide soon.

Plus, another important event occurred: we got lost.

It was probably just as well that we got lost, because it made the decision easier: we had to turn and start making our way back. So we stopped and had lunch. Vepa and I shared the ham sandwich, and Tushyati, swearing by her vegetarianism, had the Cheez-its. By this this time, we'd run through one of our two bottles of water, and things were not looking too good. In the photograph below, Vepa is pointing the way we should have gone. The worry on his face is evident.

To make matters worse, as we started on our way back, heavy clouds came in, and it began to rain heavily. And it also became cold. We had no rain gear, and not enough clothes. We were pretty tired, and our feet were hurting because of the wrong kind of footgear. We couldn't stop, because we had to get back during daylight, because we didn't have a flashlight. Plus, we seemed to be the only people out there, in the middle of nowhere. Life was not fun anymore.

On the way back, we set a fast pace, mostly out of worry that we wouldn't make it back in time. The rain stopped, but we were running out of water, and wanted to take more and more breaks. The photograph on the right is of one such water break. We kept going, and at some point started gaining confidence that we would get back in time after all. And then we also saw some other people, still on their way down. That made us feel good.

The last hour of the hike was particularly unbearable: we were very tired, and our feet were hurting more than ever. We very happy to have made it back (with plenty of time to spare), but it seemed like the end would never come: we just kept walking and walking.

When we finally made it back to the observation deck, it was 6:30pm. Tushyati drove us back to Seattle, and we had a glorious dinner. By all counts, it had been a truly exciting day.