Mt. Shuksan

Mark and I had an amazing opportunity to climb and attempt to summit Mt. Shuksan a couple of weeks ago. Mt. Shuksan is a peak in the North Cascades that stands about 9100 ft. I had never heard of htis mountain (despite living in western Washington my entire life) before I was invited to go with a group of couples to climb it.

We thought we had picked a weekend with a reasonable chance of good weather (2nd half of June). The days leading up to the climb were almost record setting in Seattle for number of consecutive sunny days, but low and behold, the rain could not stay away for two more days, and the clouds rolled in the day before we were to climb!

It was rained off and on the entire time. Mark and I were not really thinking it would be raining, so we didn't bring much of anything in the way of rain gear. The morning we were leaving it was finally sinking in that we might be doing this in the rain. We ran to Wal-mart and grabbed those huge rain ponchos. They really helped keep our stuff dry, but they were constantly getting in the way.

By the time we finally made it up to base camp, we were all completely frozen! I don't think I have ever been that cold in my life! We had to dig out level places on the snow for our tents. Because we were not hiking anymore and we were all soaking wet and could not change for fear of getting our dry clothes wet (it was still pouring), our body temperatures plumeted. At one point I looked over at Mark and I just wanted to cry. We finally got our tent set up and dove inside. Our tent was very tiny even though it was supposedly a "two man tent". Its a good thing that Mark is a small guy because we never would have fit otherwise. Let me tell you, a tent has never been more inviting than this tent was at this time! We changed into dry clothes as quickly as our shaking limbs and frozen fingers would allow and huddled in our sleeping bags for about an hour. After we had finally gotten warmed up our wonderful friends started boiling snow so we could make our dehydrated dinners. That too had never looked more inviting than our dehydrated "teriyaki beef" dinner did right then! We gobbled it up in no time. After this the rain eased up and we were able to get out and take a look around. We couldn't see much because of the clouds, but it was fun to be camped on the snow...as long as the rain stayed away.

To summit we would have had to get up at about 4:00 AM, but we were all pretty sure that the weather would not permit us to summit. Instead, we slept until about 7:30 and then got up and played in the snow (the rain had finally stopped altogether sometime that night). Then we broke camp and headed back down. The trip down was so much better than the trip up because we could actually see and we weren't being drenched. We also got to glisade down some instead of hiking.

Overall, it was a very fun and challenging adventure...my favorite kind! Here are some pictures, although I didn't have as many as I wanted:

Some of the crazy participants on our little trek:
(L to R: Lynne, Shandell, Marshall, me, Leslie, Greg)

Us in our teeny little tent.

Mark and I on our way down the mountain, but still on the glacier.

Near the end of the trail we finally got to see what was behind the clouds.

Afterwards we all went to a BBQ restaurant and the pig came to see us. Here are all the ladies.

Finally, here is a video that Mike put together for us to remember our adventure...thanks everyone!