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...