The Ahlers

Headed to Whistler this weekend to get some summer skiing in. Should be super cool -- I've only been to the village a couple of times in the summer, and I've never skied the glacier. (About that summer glacier skiing. In the summer, you apparently don't ski the thing that everyone calls the glacier in the winter. You ski a *different* glacier, the one that's skier's left of the Horstman t-bar. Huh. You can kind of figure it out based on this picture.) Forecast isn't great, but oh well.

Turns all year score so far: June? Check. July? Check. Next stop? Baker in August. :)

Not that anyone else would necessarily be interested, but here it is anyway:

(Full set of best 90 pictures is located here.)

Bill and I just returned from spending four days in The Enchantments, courtesy of Brett's permits that he wasn't able to use.

We headed over Wednesday after work to pick up the actual permits and car camped at Eight Mile Creek CG. Funny story to start the trip: they wanted $12 to camp overnight there, but we only had $11.34 in change ($20s otherwise), so we put that in the envelope and called it good. (This was at about 11 pm that night.) Bill didn't write down his name or our campsite number, so we figured there was no way they'd figure out who shorted them $0.66. The next morning, we were up pretty early anyway, and the campground host stopped by and said they were a little short in our envelope. Sure enough, they had matched up the printed number on the envelope with the one on the flap that we displayed at our campsite. So much for trying to get away with $0.66 -- The Man caught us redhanded.

The hike in was thankfully uneventful. We were going in via Aasgard Pass, which according to the guidebooks is entering The Enchantments like eating dinner in reverse: dessert first, followed by meat and potatoes, followed by salad. Whatever. It's the quickest, somewhat easiest way to get into the upper basin in a single day. The picture here is of the route leading up to Aasgard Pass from Colchuck Lake. I will admit that heading up the pass takes a lot out of you -- it's .75 miles and 2200' elevation gain. For those of you playing along at home, that's about 3 times as steep as the average grade at Mt. Si. As they say over at the TGR forums, set the Stairmaster to maximum. On the way in, we passed a ton of people -- most groups were headed into The Enchantments. We both wondered if some of the groups were going to make it that day, given the pace at which they were traveling. This one family literally took 30 minutes to make it about 100 yards of relatively easy scrambling -- nothing like what the trip up Aasgard Pass was going to put them through.

We ended up at the same camp we did last time (two years ago). I think it's the best compromise between the desolate very Upper Enchantments and the middle or lower basins: we had a few trees around us (for scenery, ease of hanging a bear bag, and somewhat of a wind screen), but we were still surrounded by the austereness of the upper lakes and streams. Around dinner time, the wind started picking up, and more and more clouds rolled in, which only added to the fatigue-induced belief we should hit the sleeping bags early. Bill likes to say I was snoring in 5 minutes, before he was even out of his jacket. :)

Friday, our goal was simple: Edward Peak. We've heard it referred to as the Lost World Plateau before, but some people refer to all or some of The Enchantments as that, so it's not really fitting for this actual plateau to be called such. (It's not really even part of what most people would consider The Enchantments proper.) I've wanted to see what's on top of it since the first time I saw it from Prusik Pass (Oct. 2002). Long story short: the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy kept going through my mind that day, and the lyrics were more than appropriate for my motivation for visiting Edward Peak: "Does that make me crazy? Probably." It was an 11-mile hike, much of it bushwhacking and route finding, with a complete mystery scramble to the top.

Was it worth it? For sure. The views from the top were spectacular, and it truly seemed like a bit of a Lost World. It was just barely lower in elevation than our camp, but the trees and wildflower-filled meadows would have you think you were thousands of feet lower. It was absolutely spectacular.

It was another long trip back to camp, after which we relaxed a bit and ate another early dinner. I'll admit, I was exhausted after the hike in the previous day and the day trip to Edward Peak and back. The weather was better than the previous night, so we stayed up till a little past sunset. I was still in bed by 9 pm. :)

On Saturday, we had another simple goal: summiting Little Annapurna (a.k.a. Little A). We could see the entire route from camp and we'd be talking strategy since we arrived. We knew it was about 1200' vertical to get to the top, and it looked like it was a ways away, so we were figuring about 2 hours up. Ha. We left camp around 10 and we summited by 10:50. So much for 2 hours. :)

I'd been up there four years ago, but this time we had considerably warmer and nicer weather than my previous summit trip. Not even as much as a breeze up there. Outstanding, really. The views N, E, and S were spectacular, but there was a considerable amount of cloud cover to the west over Puget Sound, so we couldn't see much in that direction. Nor could we see NW, which meant we couldn't see Mt. Baker, about which I was more than a little bummed.

The trip down to camp was just as unexpectedly quick, so we had most of the afternoon to lounge around in the sun. It was weird being that warm (anyone want to work on their tans at 7200'?) but have that much snow around us. Having an easy day like that was nice because we both knew Sunday's hike out would be challenging.

The sunset that night was the best one yet, both clear and not too windy. We again went to bed early, but with a relatively good reason this time -- we both got up around 5 am to watch the sun come up. It was cool to see it peek around the west side of Prusik Peak, then dive back behind it as it angled up in the sky, and then come back up over the top of The Temple. Wicked cool, in fact.

The rest of Sunday was pretty straightforward as well. Since we got up so dang early for the sunrise, we ended up getting packed up and ready to go by 7:30. It took us about 40 minutes to get to the top of Aasgard Pass and were treated to a nice surprise -- it was so clear, we could see 100 miles to Mt. Baker. Fan-tastic.

The trip down from Aasgard Pass was pretty brutal, but we survived. We only dropped packs once, at the same place we stopped for lunch on the way up, and that was only for about 10 minutes. We made it to the car by noon, and Heidelburger by 1 pm. :)

What a great trip. Thanks again for the permits, Brett!

Our niece and nephew, Lille and Cade, came to stay with their "Aunt Missy" and Uncle Tim for a few days. We all had a great time: climbing at Vertical World (thanks Libby!), swimming in the lake, going out to dinner, going sailing, coloring, going on a picture scavenger hunt, feeding the geese, etc.

Lillie is such an intelligent and articulate young gal (no, I'm not biased at all!), it seemed like a shame not to capture some of her thoughts and experiences during the four days they spent with us, so in true nerd/geek fashion, I created a journal for them -- a Blogger blog. :) Lillie dictated to me and I typed. She and I picked out the pictures to post along with the narative. Read it yourself!

Another fun Fourth of July, and another year of strange weather. It started out cloudy with some drizzling rain, then just cloudy, then sunny, then a few weather systems rolled through in the later afternoon bring some more light showers and some strange looking clouds. We did the traditional roof-jumping thing, and I've posted some photos on Zooomr (just the best ones) and Smugmug (a bunch of them).

(I'm hosting some of these pictures in a new photo sharing service--Zooomr. If I upload some pictures and include one of them in a post on my blog, they'll give me a free Pro account. Done. Cool!)

Bill and I decided it was time to revisit the part of Mt. Rainier that so kicked our asses three weeks prior. This time, we each ascended in normal hiking shoes (even though about 90% of it was on snow) and packed our skis and boots on and in our packs. This time we also ditched Libby so we wouldn't have our asses kicked by her again. :) (Okay, fine, she was still out of the country at that point, but we wouldn't have invited her even if she had been around--I don't think either Bill or I could have taken another beating like that. :)

I figured my pack was about 25 lbs. of ski gear and 15 lbs. of food, water, and extra clothes. Insult to injury for me was my wimpy hip belt on my pack, which didn't end up taking any load off my shoulders.

Thoughts about the trip:
* Two hours to the park entrance and another 20 minutes to Paradise -- easy with no traffic (leaving Seattle at 6 in the morning).
* Eatonville really is the crux of the super secret backroad shortcut. Miss the turn for it and you'll want to double back. That and there isn't really a wrong way to go coming out of Eatonville. All roads lead to highway 7.
* Add to list to bring next time: mesh diving bag.
* Don't sit downwind of the solar toilets on a hot day.
* The 4 hour trip up is *completely* worth the 75 minutes down.
* Car to car round trip was 9 am to about 3:30 pm.
* It's really hard to hike downhill on rocky trails in ski boots.
* I don't know if it was the basically holiday weekend, or the fact that it was early July, or something else, but we turned out to be something of a spectacle for the tourists up there. Everywhere we stopped on the lower mountain (where the tourists hike around on the snow), we were asked if we really skied down, how far up we had started, etc. It was kind of a fun role to play. :)
* Yes, a snowboarder kicked our ass on the way up (he was literally the only one to pass us as we went up, and we passed a ton of other people ourselves), but we absolutely smoked him on the way down (even after we intentionally skied down into a gully to get a few extra hundred feet more vertical, despite having to hike back up to the trail to continue). We probably hit the parking lot a good 15 minutes or more in front of him.
* Skiing at mach 3 right next to the boot path, taking turns in the air off of sun cups and other terrain variations, probably wasn't the most polite thing to do while a ton of people were still making the slog up to Muir with super heavy climbing packs.

Here's a picture with our upper decent route marked--red is downhill all the way into the gully, and blue is back uphill to the trail. After some mixed rock and snow, we ended up with another 15 minute run on the skis out to the car.

More pictures are here.