Comin' Round the Mountain

Thirty miles. A year ago, I wouldn’t have considered covering this kind of distance in a day – not on two feet anyway. But I’m blessed with a lot of crazy friends, and after plenty of other adventures, a plan came together. We would attempt to circumnavigate Mount St. Helen’s on the Loowit Trail in a single day.

The instigator of this madness was Dave, who had already done this and other mountains. He was in training for an even bigger feat – a 100K run – when he dislocated his shoulder rock climbing. This canceled his plans to join us for the entire day, but he still came out to cheer us on.

Nine people and three dogs left town Friday afternoon and parked at the June Lake Trailhead on the southeast side of the mountain. After a 1.5 mile backpack in, we set up tents near the lake and settled in for the evening. Travis, Erin, and Becky started a fire while the rest of us shared our food – fruit, cheese curds, cookies, and seaweed chips to name a few items.

We planned to start at 6am the next morning, so I made an early night of it. Lisa, Becky, Jason, and I set out in a dense fog around 6:15, planning to go clockwise. Dave, Patty, and Elvira rose to see us off, while Travis and Erin stayed snug in their tent.

We started with a little more adventure than we’d planned for by taking a wrong turn out of camp and ending up on a side trail over a large field of lava rock. Each cairn was hard to make out in the mist, and by the readings on Jason’s GPS, we were fairly convinced we’d already gone wrong. We checked our maps and realized our error, but decided to move forward and up to reconnect with the trail instead of turning around.

After about 1000 feet of elevation gain, we found the Loowit Trail, but it wasn’t long before we lost it again, this time enticed by the climbers’ route heading to the summit. At around 4400’, another GPS reading told us we were at exactly the right elevation but pretty far east of where we should be. Rather than lose the altitude we’d worked so hard to gain, we turned left hoping to find the trail again. The map showed the terrain as pretty level between where we were and where we wanted to be, but it didn’t account for the 3 or 4 gullies we had to cross to get there. After a lot of scrambling, we found the trail again and stayed on it for the remainder of the day.

We reached a signpost shortly after that and were a little disappointed at the distance. In two hours, we’d gone 3.1 miles on the Loowit Trail, although the GPS told us we’d done much more. And I was already out of water. We found a creek pretty quickly, and we picked up our pace and ran whenever the terrain allowed it.

Throughout the day, we met very few others. The blast zone is north of the mountain, so the south and west sides are far less traveled. There, we encountered just a handful of backpackers who were doing the trail as most people do – in 3-4 days.

The trail was a real scramble in a number of places. For most of the day, we were traversing on sand, loose rocks and boulders with several thousand feet of elevation gain and loss. Even with our increased pace, we were barely squeaking out 2 miles per hour in the beginning. It was nearly 11am, and we still had 20 miles to go. Luckily, we hit a nice long stretch of downhill for our next section through woods and on soft trail. Aside from the last section coming back into June Lake, this was our only other significant experience with tree cover. The rest of the trail was completely exposed.

We descended into a gully where the Toutle River flowed. The crossing was a little hairier than I was expecting, and I ended up with two wet feet on the other side. I pulled out my change of socks, and we restocked our water before our steep ascent out of the canyon on the other side.

As we rounded the north side of the mountain, the views were astounding. We were entering the blast zone, and the land became stark and desolate. The trees were gone, leaving little sign of life for miles. Then to our left, Spirit Lake came into view. This was a popular tourist destination before the eruption, which raised the lake and deposited thousands of fallen trees into it. On our right, we could see the snow-covered mountain and past the site of the blast, a long-cascading waterfall.

When we reached the Northeast side near Windy Pass, we started to see day-hikers mixed in with the backpackers coming in from Windy Ridge on the Truman Trail. Most of them were headed to Loowit Falls, a 9-mile round trip hike. The Falls were an extra .7 miles off-trail for us, so we continued on without the view. We still had 10 miles to go and about 5 hours of daylight left.

We crossed into the Plains of Abraham, a popular area for mountain bikers that many describe as a moonscape. We made some decent time running through the Plains, though I was beginning to tire and couldn’t keep pace with the others. As we were leaving the Plains and approaching the Ape Canyon Trail, we got the inspiration we needed. Two backpackers stopped and asked if we were the ones running around the mountain. They’d run in to Dave and Patty a short time earlier, who’d hiked all the way to the falls and were on their way back. Lisa took off in a sprint to catch them, and we all followed suit. I kept up for about 45 seconds, and then told the others to go on. I’d catch up when I could.

A few minutes later, I was crossing a muddy trickle of a stream and found a message from our friends – our names written in mud. In another 10 minutes or so, I heard a shout far off in the distance ahead of me. I was sure it was Patty, and picked up my pace. But the trail began to climb quickly, and I couldn’t see far enough ahead to make out any other people. I began to think I’d imagined the whole thing when the view finally opened up to a canyon. I was on one side, and my friends, including Patty and Dave were on the other. A quick down and up and we were reunited with 4.5 miles to go.

The worst for me was yet to come though. Shortly after that, we approached another ravine. Steep and comprised of mostly loose sand, it looked to be a long fall to the rocks and creek below. I was tired and unsure on my feet, so I sat down and zig-zagged my way down painfully slowly, with Patty helping me through a couple of difficult spots. Even Dave’s dog Sam had no interest in coming down and had to be prodded and helped. A beautiful stream awaited us at the bottom, and I took off my shoes to empty out the loose sand and rocks that had deposited in them. I took note of the number of blisters that had formed over the course of the day, but didn’t think to treat them. I just wanted to finish.

The last 4 miles took probably 2 hours, but it seemed like an eternity. The others went ahead, but Patty stuck with me and helped to take my mind off the pain with the “Four Letter Word” game and “Catagories”. I got to hear about her day of hiking with Dave. They had planned on going only as far as Ape Canyon, about 5.5 miles from June Lake. But they’d started early and were feeling strong, so they continued to Loowit Falls, making it a 20+ mile day through some pretty tough terrain. The pads on Sam’s feet had gotten pretty torn up, and Patty had to carry him part of the time. Sam, incidentally, had run the Loowit Trail with Dave in 2007, but the rocks had gotten to him then too. Dave had to carry Sam on his back for the last few miles of the trail.

I was nearing complete exhaustion when we descended back down to the treeline and the softer ground that came with it. When we finally reached the .3 mile side trail into June Lake, my energy rebounded a bit. I started to run, but even then couldn’t keep up with Patty’s walking pace. On the steepest parts, she stopped and let me lean on her shoulder to descend. Now that’s what Bill Withers was singing about.

I could see the campsite ahead, and started running a little faster just to make a show of it. It was nearly 14 hours after we’d started. I don’t have a final count of the miles run, but I know it was somewhere between 30 and 69 (according to Jason’s malfunctioning GPS). Travis and Erin presented me with an amazing finisher’s prize – a tiny gummy cheeseburger. I’d been talking about cheeseburgers for the last 5 miles, so it was like they’d read my mind.

It was after 8:00, so we packed up our camps quickly and hiked back to the trailhead. I decided not to look at the damage done to my feet until I could get to the car and put on flip-flops permanently. The final count of blisters is 13 – 8 on my left foot and 5 on my right. This ties the record for me incidentally, although the previous 13 were created in two days of walking, not one.

We were lucky enough to find a bar open late in the town of Cougar 15 miles away. One bacon cheeseburger and a beer later, and I was ready to pass out in the back of Travis’s truck for the ride home. 13 blisters and a bathtub full of silt. I can’t imagine a better weekend.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4GGJjVmRCQ

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/amy.e.yates/CominRoundTheMountain#