Laurabelle's Blog

I’m feeling a lot better this morning than I was last night. I woke up in the middle of the night, needing to use the bathroom, legs screaming—but Jeff woke up when I whimpered in pain, and he brought me a glass of water for my aspirin. The aspirin made me feel much better, and this morning I’m almost back to normal (though most emphatically not ready to get up and do it again!).

Jeff and I left the house just before 8am yesterday morning and arrived at the park at about 10am. We stopped at Christine Falls on the way in, sipped our Odwalla smoothies, and shot a couple of photos of the falls. (The image to the right is one I shot using the slow shutter mode of my camera, to catch the moving water.)

We got on the trail at about 11:30. The trail we chose was the Skyline, which runs a loop 5.5 miles long, with 1700 feet of elevation gain in the middle. It was a harder trail than I intended it to be (not yet having a good feel for mileage and elevation gain), but I’m not sorry we did it. We wound through alpine meadows, painted red and gold and orange with the colors of fall, and scaled ridges from which we could see Mount Adams, Mount Hood, and even Mount St. Helens.

Fellow hikers reported that they could see plumes from St. Helens, but we couldn’t make anything out besides the crater and a bit of the glacier inside. Jeff is taking a geology class this quarter and is thus very excited that St. Helens is active right now. While we were eating lunch on a rocky ridge overlooking Paradise Valley, he asked me what I’d do if an earthquake hit right then. It’s something I’d never thought about before, since Texas doesn’t have earthquakes or volcanoes.

Even on the stony ridges, above the trees and brilliant grasses, Jeff and I saw chipmunks, buzzing insects, and even a hoary marmot.

The hoary marmot is one of the oddest animals I’ve ever seen, with rough dark fur, nimble clawed feet, and buck teeth like a badger on a white-tipped muzzle. The one we saw burst out from a hole just below the trail and scampered down to a flat rock a few yards below the trail, on which he proceeded to pose and preen himself. In this picture he looks just like Horace when we’ve inadvertently disturbed his bath.

At Panorama Point, the Skyline Trail splits off into a lower and an upper trail, which exist because the lower trail is covered by snow most of the year. Now it’s covered, and I’m not joking—this was a sheer snow-bank without any clear way to get to the other side. (I wish I had remembered to snap a picture.) Jeff and I walked out a little way on the snow, decided that discretion is the better part of valor, and took the high road. My feet and legs didn’t like it, but it was a good thing we did it that way, because once Jeff and I got over to the other side of the valley, we saw several other hikers trying to get across the snow. They were over the first first lip of snow and perched precariously on the (non-level) second lip, below which the cliff of snow really dropped off. By the time we noticed them, they had realized this was less than a good idea and were trying to get out but not having a very good time of it. Unfortunately, their situation was so precarious that they couldn’t afford to make a single mistake, or they’d slip and slide right over the edge. Jeff used his cell phone to call 911, which connected him to the park rangers’ office, who then dispatched a ranger to come up and rescue these guys. A few minutes later, we saw that the guys on the snowbank had finally managed to get themselves up to the top, so Jeff called back and let the rangers know. I’m glad they weren’t actually hurt; it would have been awful to see a tragedy and yet be too far away and too powerless to do anything about it. Even the park ranger was at least an hour away.

As we descended the mountain, bare rocks gave way to small trees mixed in among the rocks, and then to larger trees and meadows again. My legs, exhausted by the climb, began to tremble mildly but uncontrollably. Eventually they were too tired even to tremble, and I concentrated only on putting one foot in front of the other. Still, we were both alert enough to hear the sound of a small, plump rodent pika fussing at us from its perch on the boulders above the trail.

I was tired, and Jeff was hungry, so we didn’t head directly home (as we had planned) but stopped for dinner outside the park. First we stopped at a restaurant in Ashford, very close to the park, because Jeff said the food there was very good. But the staff snubbed us hard when we got in (didn’t invite us to sit down and were very quick to recommend other places we could go), so we left and decided never to go there again. (I can’t remember what the place was called (Alexander’s Inn), but it was a beautiful wooden building with a little water-wheel out front. Admittedly we were not terribly well-dressed, but we had been hiking; what did they expect of visitors to the park? Sheesh.) So we headed back down the road to a little restaurant in an old train dining car. The food was not five-star, but it was hot and hearty, and the service could not be faulted for friendliness and attention.

My legs died on the way home, and even though Jeff massaged them and I stretched them before bed, I woke up in the middle of the night, in pain. When I went into the other room to get my aspirin, my whimpering woke Jeff (bless his heart), and he got up to bring me a glass of water. The aspirin must have helped a lot, because now my legs are merely tired rather than falling off.