This time, the mountain won

On Thursday, Mike and I did another Mt. Si climb. We got a later start since we were leaving from Shoreline instead of my office in Bellevue. This time I added alot more weight to my pack, it was 50+ pounds this time. Well, this turned out to be a bit much! About 2 miles in, I was really struggling and decided to dump out one of the bags of dirt that I was carrying up there and that helped out. For some reason this hike kicked both our asses. We finally got to the top right as the sun was setting (see photo). Which looked nice, but it also meant that we had to do most of the way down in complete darkness. It's actually a good thing because it gives me a change to get used to wearing the headlamps as we will be doing the morning we make the summit on Rainer. We are leaving base came at 1:00 AM, so the first few hours will be in total darkness.
I am kinda discouraged after this climb, It seems like these training hikes should start to be getting easier as we get closer to the climb date, but this felt like a setback. We are going to start trying to do multiple hikes during the weeks as our schedules allow. Hopefully this will help.