Today's hike was my first attempt at hiking Mount Si after work. This hike comes the day after my white water rafting trip on the Skykomish. Looking back on the hike I can safely say it was a mistake to do. Sure, it was a good hike, but physically I was not ready for that much physical activity on back to back days.

Nuria and I left work at 2:00 pm and drove to her house so she could change. While I waited for her to get ready, I got the opportunity to be the witness on a will that John was finishing for one of his clients. That was kinda fun. Just before we left John and Nuria's house I asked Nuria if she remembered her head lamp in case we did not finish until dark. She said yes. Remember that for later.

I remembered from the prior week that I ran out of energy at about the 3.5 mile mark. To help combat this, I took 6 packets of power gel and "ate" them at about 45 minute intervals. While good at first, towards the end, I really got to hate the taste of it.

I also learned that the lack of energy near the top was not due to lack of carbs but due to not being in good enough shape yet to get to the top with all my energy. Lesson learned. I need to do shorter hikes for a few weeks until I get into better shape. I have about a month until there is enough snow melted off the other peaks to really vary the hiking much anyhow, so I will use this month to build up endurance.

At about the 3.5 mile marker I ran out of energy again. Sure, we made it to the top, but the last 1/2 mile was a real pain. We stayed at the top for 20-30 minutes and began to head back down. Looking at the time, there was no way we would make it off the mountain before dark. I told Nuria she should take her head lamp out of her pack now for convenience. She told me she had forgotten this. (Funny I seem to remember something about asking her if she remembered her head lamp AT HER HOUSE!)

The trip down seemed to take forever. I again got very tired by about 1/2 way down. We got off the mountain at around 9:45. This made the whole trip about 6 hours (about an hour longer than last time.

No more Mount Si for me for the next couple weeks. I need to build up some more endurance first. I still have the goal of 2 hours to the top by the end of July.

Here is a panoramic view from the top of Mount Si:

• The best way is a Quicktime VR. You can see the image as though you were standing where I was. This version is 3.5 MB and is not recommended for low bandwidth users. If you do not have Quicktime, you can get it from http://www.quicktime.com. Here is the image in this format.
  
  
• The second best way is a long jpeg. This is only 196K and you should be able to view it just fine that way. It is not as impressive as the Quicktime format, but it is a much smaller download. Here is the image in this format.

Here are the pictures from the trip:

• Pic 1
• Pic 2
• Pic 3
• Pic 4
• Pic 5
• Nuria
• Jeffrey