RonS

Hey, Bob, thanks for sending this link to me via my mom. Good to hear that you like this method of getting high. When we went up S. Helens it was that trip where we got whited out and turned back before the summit, right? I remember the first time I went up St. Helens, late summer 1969, before it blew its top. I was on my first ever backpack trip and had all the wisdom of a 19-year-old. I was camping on the Plains of Abraham, just above Ape Canyon, with friend John M, who had done 50-milers in the Boy Scouts and should have known better than to do what we ended up doing. From binoculars, it looked to us like you could hike almost to the summit on rock. So up we went one morning, with nothing but cutoff jeans, a t-shirt, hiking boots, and a sack lunch. About halfway up we discovered that the lichen stopped holding the rocks together and what had looked like an easy walk up rock turned into an impossible struggle up talus consisting of just pumice. So we ventured out onto the snow and progressed to the false summit. John stopped there, as he was feeling a bit sick due to painkillers from having just had his wisdom teeth removed. We lunched and I would later realize that I left my retainer sitting there (I had recently had braces on my teeth). While John rested, I did the most stupid thing I have ever done. I walked across the crater to the true summit and back. I later learned that the crater was full of crevasses and I am lucky to have not fallen into one. On the way down we discovered glissading, but couldn't stop as we didn't have ice axes. We ended up in the sitting position with the ice chafing the underside of our thighs where the cutoffs ended. I saw John dig in his heels and do a somersault twice. I thought he was doing it for laughs but later he said he was trying to stop. Fortunately, there was a nice runout at the bottom before the glacier met rock. We were hours going up, but down in 45 minutes. A couple of years later I took a climbing class through the UW Experimental College and came to fully appreciate what fools we had been in our final year as teenagers. I was on the summit two more times before it blew, with appropriate equipment, of course.