I was contacted by NCARB in the middle of the year about being a tester/reviewer for their new architectural registration exams. They originally wanted me to go to Tuscon in August but fortunately I had a conflict that kept me from visiting the desert during the hottest time of the year. When I heard there was a trip to Portland I jumped on it faster than Stephen Baldwin jumps on a really bad script. Portland is an area that I've always wanted to go to. Site unseen it was also a place that I could imagine living in. Now I would get the opportunity to visit at no cost to me! What could be better.
My good friend Pat up in Chicago's brother and sister-in-law just moved to Portland. When Pat found out I was going, magically the trip out west became more than just a business trip, we decided to head out a few days early to hook up w/ his family and try to get some snowboarding in on Mt. Hood. Unfortunately Mother Nature didn't cooperate with us and there was too little snow on Mt. Hood to justify taking the snowboard across the country so we decided to get some hiking in. That turned out to be the best decision ever because besides the lack of snow, they had unseasonably warm weather that was in the 50's and more importantly, it was nothing but sunshine.
On Friday, Pat and I decided to head up to Mount St. Helen's for some hiking. I've traveled with Pat before and whether it's a trip to a mountain or a trip to the grocery store, you are definitely in for an adventure. We made up our way to the last visitors center and got out to make our best effort to find some good trails. Everyone we talked to recommended us taking this one trail up to a neighboring peak to get the best view of Mount St. Helen's. We decided that we had a pretty decent view from where we were standing and decided to make it a quest to try to hike up to the crater. After all, that would be an adventure. The hard thing about Mount St. Helen's is really being able to judge distances. There is absolutely nothing left after the explosion in 1980. No trees, no vegetation, nothing. Nothing that we could use to really judge scale. What looked like a trek of only a few miles would be more like 7 miles one way. The other thing about Mount St. Helen's is that because there is absolutely nothing there to sustain them, there is really little signs of wildlife. I think we saw a few Elk which I was really surprised about and one bird. That combined w/ the total lack of wind there made for a very eerie experience. It was like you were truly hiking on Mars.
After 3 hours, we finally made it to the water fall on the Mountain. Unfortunately it looked like our goal was still about 1 hour further up. We were also at the end of the 'sanctioned' trail which was sort of a joke since the only thing that was there were rocks. Hard to disrupt the environment when there is nothing but rocks to hike over in my mind. It's for that reason that we decided to take the most direct route back to the visitors center.I should clarify, we only did this because we were getting challenged by losing sunlight (It gets dark at 4:30) and on the hike out when purposefully trying to stay on the trail, we'd lose it because it was really hard to distinguish where the trail was and where it wasn't. It made for a really fun walk back. We got to experience an area that maybe only a handful of people and elk have but it made it difficult because there was some really tough terrain to navigate through.
In the end, we estimate that we saved nearly an hour by taking a bit more direct route. I would imagine that their established trail takes you so far out because of how much water might be running through the valley during the spring melt off of the snow on the mountains. With it being dry we were pretty safe. The only difficult part was having to climb a 30% slope back up to find the trail. It was a blast though and by far one of my best experiences in the mountain. I only wish we had more daylight to have been able to make it up to the top.
Day two in Portland brought a trip to the Columbia River Gorge. This time we went with Brad, Em & their friend from Chicago Evan. I don't want to take the easy road here, but Brad did a good job blogging it so I will refer you to his site as well as some good pictures for the day.
Today is the big Elves & More Delivery day. I can't sleep which is why I started blogging this at 6:00 this morning. I will blog about the delivery here in the next few days as well as hopefully get some pictures posted. All I can say is that although its only going to be in the 20's, there's going to be about 1,000 happy kids in Akron.b
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