Luke observes:

April 2, 2008

Here are a few photos from my hike this past weekend at King Mt. in the Oregon coast range. For the benefit of those who don’t already know, Sarah and I are taking a mountain climbing class and there are “conditioning” hikes each weekend. We’ve only been in the class two weeks and the first hikes are supposed to be relatively easy. The first one was, and this past weekend the instructor told us we’d have a quick hike once again, up to the top and back down by about 1:30 pm. In fact it was going to be so easy our instructor was going to take us off-trail, bushwacking through the forest on an alternate route to the top.  

Well, it just so happened the coast range has experienced record snowfall the last week, (four feet in about two days,) and it was snowing again while we hiked. At the lower elevations the going wasn’t so bad but the higher we got, the deeper the snow became until we were traveling only a few hundred feet an hour. I kept thinking we should turn around but our instructor kept telling us we were “committed now!” and that the top was only just a short distance away.  

In fact it took us until 4 pm to reach the summit (it’s only a 3,200 foot tall mountain) and another two hours to get back down. We came back down on an established trail which had been cleared by another group a few days before but it still took us two hours! That was with us literally running, since we were so sick of being up there, and many of us were late for other appointments.  

Well it was amazingly beautiful but the exertion required to wade uphill even fifty feet through deep, damp snow up to one’s chest is an experience I won’t forget and hopefully will never repeat. We switched off breaking trail but each of us could only manage about five minutes before needing to be relieved by someone farther back. Fortunately we had one hiker who happens to be really skinny and about seven feet tall. Somehow this allowed him to get through the snow the easiest of any of us and he did by far the most breaking of the trail. Without him  we probably wouldn’t have made it back before dark. He was the only one who had enough energy to take pictures throughout the ordeal. These photos were taken by him. He is a really great photographer, only on this hike his camera lens was fogging up a bit.