Nick's Blog

Volcanic Neck is a peculiar feature high on the ridge joining Bean Peak and Devils Head in the Teanaway region of the east-central Cascades.  It's peculiar because  it is unlike most of features in the area.  As a 300ft pillar of rock standing above its surroundings, it looks formiddable from a distance.  Jenny has been wanting to try some more technical scrambles and this, rated as a T5 in 75 Scrambles in Washington , it tops the rating system for scrambling.  Much to her terror, I suggested we do this peak, along with a quick double header over to Bean Peak.  So having had Monday off from work thanks to some other plans that fell through, we decided this would be the day.  The forecast was good but not perfect.  We knew we could expect cooler temperatures than the 90-100 degrees we had the previous week in Seattle and we knew it would be mostly sunny, but the forecast also included a wind advisory, steady 20-30 with gusts to 50.  Sheesh... ...

It all started with a grand plan to spend 4-5 days summitting Mount Olympus: a grueling 17.5 mi hike to basecamp, followed by a heavily glaciated 8000ft peak in Washington's Olympic National Park, and the subsequent hike out.  The time and effort involved just getting to basecamp meant that we wanted to be relatively sure we would get a decent weather window but days prior to our trip, weather forecasts for the Peninsula were ironclad-bad.  It was going to rain.  Hard.  The whole time.  So we altered our plans and made for the east and south cascades.  We had struck out with Mount Saint Helens a couple weeks prior thanks to not being able to obtain a permit, but now, with nothing but dripping sunshine on the horizon and midweek permits available during the time I had already taken off work, we figured now was the time. So we headed down to Cougar, WA to pick up our permits at the Lone Fir Resort, a place we had visited almost a year earlier when we explor...

Earlier in the winter, I enrolled in The Mountaineers Alpine Scrambling course which consists of a few workshops at the clubhouse and then several skill-building field trips in various conditions.  Along with the core portions of this class are co-requisites of Mountaineering First Aid, which took up four 8hr Saturdays and Navigation, which took one particularly miserable rainy and cold Saturday in March.  This past Saturday was the "Rock Field Trip" in Leavenworth, WA.  Having a bit of rock climbing experience, most of this was trivial but it was a great reason to get out to Leavenworth for the first time, since I had heard a lot of good things about the area.  Jenny, highly unamused at the prospect of sharing yet another weekend with The Mountaineers, entered her protest and we came up with a diabolical plan to smuggle her in on the trip and then have Sunday to ourselves up there to enjoy the area further.  So Friday night we packed up everything we coul...

I've heard of Mount Ellinor from locals.  I've read about it on SummitPost .  I've seen it poking out at the south end of the Olympics.  Needless to say, we have been wanting to do this since we knew about it.  So with a beautiful forecast, Jenny and I readied our packs and headed to the Olympic Peninsula.  We took the Fauntleroy-Southworth Ferry for a quick ride across Puget Sound and then headed directly for Hoodsport on US101.  From there, a meandering road through the hills and we found ourselves skirting beautiful Lake Cushman.  Eventually we turned onto the gravel Forest Service Road 24 and began winding our way steeply up to the trailhead, peering over the steep edges of this narrow road - only minutes before, we had passed a tow-truck with a 'victim' of the terrain in tow.  A dodge pickup had tried to turn around in a bad place or had been going too fast.  Either way, the evidence of rollover was clear.  Hearing the gravel crunc...

After a snowy Saturday spent with The Mountaineers' Alpine Scrambling Field Trip at Stevens Pass, I was looking forward to the true freedom of the hills with none other than Jenny.  We pored through the various guidebooks and wta.org listings and narrowed it down to a few options.  I wanted something snowy and high and I had been wanting to visit Mount Pilchuck for awhile.  The weather forecast was for Partly Cloudy and warm which, in the Pacific Northwest, is as good as it gets in the spring.  So Pilchuck it was! Sunday morning got off to a lazy start, which is usually counter to our weekend warrior goals, but with the days  being so much longer, I didn't feel the need to hurry so we enjoyed a good balanced breakfast and got everything packed and ready for the day.  We planned for wet but warm air and soft-snow conditions at the trailhead transitioning to windy, cold, and potentially icy conditions at the summit.  In other words, we w...

We decided to combine a trip to visit some friends of ours in Tahuya on Saturday and be a little closer to the Olympics for a good hike on Sunday.  So after a late start Sunday morning, we made our way up to the trailhead for the Lower South Fork Skokomish River Trail along FS2353 in the Olympic National Forest.  Although we had hoped for the same kind of mostly-sunny weather we had the day before at Deception Pass, we were not disappointed to find foggy vistas on our way. At the trailhead, we quickly sorted out out ten essentials.  The hardest part was picking which foodstuffs we would take with us for our lunch.  We signed the trail register and I took note of the "Couger sightings" notice on the kiosk before starting the climb up the hill into the river basin. Trails that start out instantly uphill are the damnedest thing.  No time to warm up the lungs or ligaments... just straight into it.  Several hundred feet later though, and we ha...