Training on the Big Mountain

Next Tuesday, Mike and I will be taking a day trip to Mt. Rainier to do a training hike from Paradise lodge to Camp Muir. This is the same hike that will be the first day of our hike on the 27th. So this will be the real test to see where I am at physically and mentally for this climb. It will be the first hike that we do that is almost completely in snow. This will be a new challenge hiking in snow boots. I'll let you know how it goes! We have been keeping busy these last few weeks doing our normal training hikes. We are now doing all our training with full weight packs. It's amazing how much difference that makes.

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.

Training Continues

Well, we are just under 2 months until our Mt. Rainer climb and our training continues. Mike and I did our first climb up Mt Si on monday. It went pretty well. This was definately the toughest climb so far. We have been doing Poo-Poo Point and Tiger Mountain until now and they are both great hikes, but Mt. Si takes it up a level. This is the hike that most say is the most similar to the first day of the Rainer climb from Paradise lodge to Camp Muir.
Here is a photo from a few weeks back on one of our hikes up Tiger Mountain.
June 27th is coming quickly!