A 6 mile walk in the clouds
Topographical Map generated with my GPS and MapSource
This hike was all about exercise and nothing else. Rain in the summer is fairly rare in the Pacific North West but today was the exception. Both weather.com and accuweather.com said that Granite Mountain was going to have rain today while Mount St. Helen's was going to be Partly Cloudy. I called Dan at around 4:45 am and asked him if he wanted to change the hike to Mt. St. Helen's. He thought it was a good idea as well and so we made that change.
We started the hike at about 9:00 am and the sky was completely overcast. The clouds were relatively low and you could not see Mount St. Helen's from the visitor's center or the tops of many of the surrounding hills. Still believing the weather report, we decided to start the hike because the clouds would burn off soon.
The trail head was not that close to the trailhead location provided by my Garmin Topographical map. Knowing that it was the South Coldwater Trail was a big help as I still have the ability to read signs even when my GPS disagrees.
At the beginning of the hike I was immediately fatigued. I am not really sure what was going on, but before we crossed the half mile point I was ready to turn around and go home. If Dan had not been there, that is exactly what I would have done too. The feeling soon passed and I did not mention it to Dan at all. What you have to realize is that there was next to no scenery to look at due to the low clouds.
On trails Dan and I have rather interesting and bizarre conversations. Two are rather significant this time so I will tell them. At about 0.7 miles, there is a bend in the trail. Due to some rather interesting acoustic properties in the area, you could take 3 steps and go from hearing the creek below quite loudly to not hearing it at all. Dan noticed this and started walking back and forth those three steps and saying "Loud", "Soft". One of us, and I can remember which one, made the correlation between what he was doing and Grover from Sesame Street doing "Near", "Far" running back and forth with his little spindly arms raised, shaking them as he ran. I did my best Grover imitation and did exactly that between the two spots.
The second is when Dan was telling me about an episode of Farscape he had watched and he named a character from the show. I have only seen one episode of Farscape so I do not know the characters. In the episode I saw, all the characters had changed bodies due to a mishap on board and one of the male characters was in the a female characters body. When he thought no one was looking, he (with his/her back to the camera) unzipped his/her top and shook his/her torso to make his/her breasts shake back and forth. He got caught by the person who's body it actually was and was a fairly funny scene. I asked Dan if the character he was referring to was the one that shook her breasts. He confirmed I had the right character.
Why these two events are significant is because Dan and I discussed on the way down how we have some interesting conversations and if anyone passed us, they would think us quite strange. I wonder what someone would have thought seeing me doing my Grover imitation. In the second case, we were actually passed by someone around the time I asked Dan if this was the woman who was shaking her breasts around (not really thinking about how that would sound to someone with no context to the conversation). A couple minutes after he passed we got a pretty big laugh about it.
Back to the trail... At about 2.3 miles we hit the clouds. We were now walking in a rather dense fog and getting pretty damp. We decided to continue on to 3 miles for the exercise if nothing else and did that to the 3 mile mark. The fog only got worse, so we decided to turn around and go back to the truck.
The way down, the fog was persistent until we nearly got to the truck. Instead of getting better, conditions were getting worse. Rain started shortly after we started driving, so all things considered we turned around at the right time.
To give you an idea of the foggy conditions I have put up two pictures we took just as we turned around.
