Ever since we moved to Washington, we’ve had a thing for volcanoes (as you might have noticed) and ever since we spent a fantabulous night in a fire lookout last summer, we’ve had a thing for Mount Baker. Seriously, who wouldn’t - just look at it:

When we signed up for the mountaineering class this winter, we were excited to learn that Baker would be our “graduation” climb. Unfortunately I didn’t get that far since I am a recovering wuss, but JK and the gang have been preparing all spring. I was happy to learn that I would at least be able to join them in camp on Mount Baker for their climb.

I was really dragging ass on the hike in to camp on Saturday since I had spent the whole week withering away on the couch, eating nothing but mashed potatoes and chocolate pudding to appease my throbbing jaws after the wisdom teeth extraction. I was also carrying ten pounds more than my regular overnight pack weight - I brought my climbing gear in case we were going to do some crevasse rescue practice. We didn’t, so it was all in vain - but lord knows I needed some extra training.

After a week of absolutely insane warmth and sun, the weather unfortunately decided to go all Pacific Northwest on us as we started hiking, effectively removing any motivating views along the way. At least we got our first marmot sighting of the year, which pleased me to no end - they are my absolute favorite animals (apart from Bobbys and Wellingtons) and I feel a strong kinship with them (they’re fat, they eat plants, and they hibernate - sounds familiar).

We set up camp at 6,400 feet and enjoyed sporadic views of the mountain and our surroundings as the cloud cover came and went.

We went to bed at six in an attempt to get some snooze time; the climbers were scheduled to start moving up the mountain at 1AM.

I popped out of the tent to see them off, then went back to have the best alpine sleep of my life (I used JK’s stuff to make a double Thermarest-and-sleeping bag fort) while the poor suckers roped up and slogged on up the mountain in the dark.

I guess it’s not so bad when you get views like these along the way:

Finally they reached the summit of Mount Baker, 10,781 feet (3,286 m) - huzzah!

As the sun came up, I lazily rolled out of tent to watch the climbers making their way back down the mountain:

On the way down they could see all the beautiful (but slightly unnerving) crevasses they had passed by in the dark on the way up.

Now, of course, I really want to go on a big climb myself - hopefully I’ll get my chance later this year or next summer. I try to tell myself that the mountains aren’t going anywhere, but then I remember our hike to the crater rim of Mount St. Helens and realize that this might not be true…

As part of my big plan to fix all the little (and big!) things I have neglected in my life during the Great Depression, I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted on Monday. Finally. I should have done this so many years ago, but I just kept putting it off. They have caused me quite a lot of annoyance and more than enough pain. The worst was when one of them got badly infected in India - man alive, that’s a situation I never want to be in again - and now they are finally gone. Huzzah!

Unfortunately I will have to endure another week or so of discomfort until my mouth is happy again and I stop looking like a greedy hamster, but at least I have drugs, ice cream and books galore.

In the meantime, here are some layouts from last year. I love this first one; it perfectly sums up our summer:

..and this one is somewhat bittersweet, about our oh so cute niece and nephew and how sad it is that we live so far away from them the rest of our family as well.

Alright, so I kept waiting for JK to be able to help me photograph this album, but the only days he came home early enough we were too busy - so here’s a lovely mish-mash of porch photos and scans of the pages I’ve made so far. The album is an 8×8 corduroy album from American Crafts in the most desert-like color I could find. The page protectors are from We R Memory Keepers, but unfortunately they didn’t fit the album - I had to punch two extra holes in each protector. Lame.

I wanted the album to really focus on the photos, so I chose white and grey cardstock as my base, no patterned paper (there’s so much color in the photos already!) and minimal embellishments - just those cute butterflies from Quickutz, cut out in different sizes with my Silhouette. This page is from our first hike of the trip, to Cable Mountain in Zion National Park:

I’m using the same fonts throughout the album: Century Gothic for journaling, CK Becky for the “handwritten” titles and Modern No. 20 for the rest of the titles.

If you live in St. George (or anywhere in Utah for that matter), you must visit Snow Canyon State Park. We ended up there as a backup when our backpacking trip in Zion got rained out, and we were so happy it happened!

To go with the butterfly theme (ok, so it was just an excuse to finally use them…), I’m adding butterfly transparencies from Hambly between some of the pages. I love those things.

To make the pages easy to put together (since I have yet to actually finish an album…), I’m using a bunch of divided 4×6 page protectors, and a lot of the designs are based on 4×6 or 5×7 photos - the 8×8 size is perfect for this!

This is from Bryce Canyon National Park where we hiked an excellent little loop:

After Bryce we spent some time in Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. Again, everyone should visit this place! Lots of little hikes and areas to explore, and the best campground you’ll ever find (free showers!).

We avoided Vegas (ugh, Vegas) like the plague and chose slot canyons over slot machines:

Valley of Fire was where we saw our favorite animals of the trip (antelope ground squirrels and chuckwallas!) and our absolute least favorite animal (rattlesnake, eep!!):

I attached the butterflies to the outside of some of the page protectors because it looked more interesting - let’s see how long it takes before they fall off.

…and here’s a mushy closing page (for the time being) with a collection of some of our self-portraits.

Happy vacation, happy album, happy me! The full trip report is on nwhikers.net.

That’s right, we were lucky enough to get climbing permits for Mount St. Helens on Memorial Day! Not only would it be our first trip to the top of one of the Cascade volcanoes (luckily St. Helens is the lowest one, and the 1980 eruption knocked a good 1000 feet off our ascent, moahaha), but it would be my first time camping on snow. Except for the fact that my hiking boots are very non-waterproof, it was great. I actually do own a pair of very expensive waterproof mountaineering boots, but I haven’t been able to break them in yet. My feet are very weird, wide and wonky, much like the rest of me.

Anyway, back to camping. We hiked in a couple of miles and set up camp in the last flat area we could find, right below the tree line. Since it was already getting dark, we just had dinner, melted some snow for water for the next day, and some of us (cough) tried to dry our soggy feet and boots as the stars were coming out.

Since it was a beautiful and oh so warm weekend, we decided to get an early start before the snow turned into a slushy mess - we started hiking up at 4:45 in the morning when the snow was still nice and firm. (If you decide to start this early it might be a good idea to bring some crampons for the icier parts.)

Gawking at the beautiful sunrise colors all around us made all the *up* seem a little less horrible.

Finally the sun popped over the ridge where Mount Adams was watching over us from the east.

After four hours we made it to the top - suddenly the crater rim was just there and we realized it would probably be a good idea to stop walking. The views were amazing; the steaming lava dome in the crater, Spirit and Coldwater Lakes in front of Mount Rainier to the north, Mount Hood to the south and Mount Adams to the east.

We tried to capture the view of the crater in this less-than-stellar panorama shot (click to open it in flickr where you can see the big version), but you really have to be there to appreciate how impressive this thing really is.

I was having some stomach issues (let’s just say it was the wrong time of the month to do anything more strenuous than pigging out on the couch in front of Gilmore Girls), so I stayed by the crater viewpoint as JK and Carlos hiked up another 200 feet or so to the true summit.

Me with those smelly boys I keep hiking with:

By the time we decided to head down, the sun had already warmed the snow to a wet, heavy slush, which meant that even I had the cojones to try glissading.

I have no words for how enjoyable it felt to slide down past those poor bastards who were slogging up, sometimes popping through the snow and ending up knee-deep in slush. Moahahaaa! Getting up early that day proved to be a very wise decision.

After yet another attempt at drying my soggy toes, we took down our tents, donned our heavy packs and headed back to the car. 11 miles, 5700 feet of elevation gain, and yet another excellent trip with these two boys:

Remember how I was complaining about not being able to go on a vacation to the Utah area this spring? Well, we ended up getting a somewhat last minute chance to go, so our huzzahs were heard around the world. We dropped everything and headed off to Nevada and Utah for a week of canyons and general awesomeness.

I don’t have time to write much about the trip right now, but I did write a trip report with lots of photos on nwhikers.net if you want to take a look.

In a display of uncharacteristic efficiency, I am already halfway done with my album for our trip. I wanted to share some pages from it today but the photos I took look like crap and I’ll have to wait until after the weekend when my lovely assistant JK can help me. I’ll see you on the other side of the three-day weekend!

I’m not even going to come up with an excuse for being behind on posts again since that seems to be the normal state of affairs around here, so instead I’ll just share hiking photos from this weekend:

On Saturday JK and I took little Wellington to Mount Persis, the big peak in the first photo. This was his first real snow hike (albeit in very warm temperatures), so we were excited to see that he did really, really well. He got cold in the wind on the summit, but the snow didn’t really seem to bother him at all. Success!

The hike itself was gorgeous, with all sorts of rugged peaks popping out everywhere and a fun climber’s trail. I tend to prefer going short and steep rather than walking on gentle forest roads for hours on end, so this was right up my alley. It was great to be out on the trail again and feeling great despite not seeing the inside of a gym for over a month - I lost my workout mojo once I stopped training for Mount Baker, so I need a new, concrete goal to work towards. Ponder ponder…

Wellie is still masquerading as a real dog and spent most of his time on the summit chewing on a stick. I think I like him.

…we have desert too! JK had another all-weekend class with the Washington Alpine Club this weekend, so I tagged along with Tom, Dani and their morbidly obese (sorry, “stout”) dog Jasper for a hike in the Umtanum Canyon. Eastern Washington really is a different world…I approve of all the sun they get, but not so much of the snakes, spiders and ticks. Bobs ended up getting some sort of weird bite on the inside of his leg, but according to the vet he’s totally fine. Poor little Scabnose, first the broken toe and now a bite dangerously close to his genitals!

Wellington is doing great by the way. I’m still amazed by how dog-like he is for an Italian Greyhound. Here he’s chewing on a stick (Bobby would never even think of acting so…canine) he found on the hike:

…and here he’s nursing Bobby back to good health after the vet appointment:

Alrightyroo, short post (I have to run) but at least it’s a post. Ok, so it was just an excuse to post the cute photo of Wellie with the stick.

I haven’t been scrapbooking much the last couple of months, and when I do dust off my neglected hobby, I feel like I am just doing the same thing over and over again. Hiking photos, blue and white papers (usually from the same big slab of paper I bought at Costco a couple of years ago because I am too lazy to look for anything else), Heidi Swapp transparent snowflakes (ditto) and a computer font for the title. It’s all about the laziness; my scrapbooking crap is in such a horrid state of disarray that it is impossible to find what I am looking for and, frankly, not very tempting to sit down and make a page. Basically I need to just suck it up and clean.

Ali Edwards used a digital template in the current issue of Creating Keepsakes that I just fell in love with, so I had to try it. I wanted to stuff more photos from our hike to Camp Muir in there, so I made a second page using the top of the template. Easy and fast, huzzah!

(Speaking of Ali, this post made me really want to get into scrapbooking again.)

I made this next layout for the February issue of CK - the photos are from our amazing trip to Jade Lake last summer. The paper is blue but at least I didn’t use those transparent snowflakes.

JK spent all last weekend climbing up by Anacortes with my erstwhile mountaineering classmates, so I was left to my own devices. Since the weather looked promising, I contacted Gabi and joined her and a group of the Seattle Hikers for a trip to Rainier. Yes, another trip to Rainier. I’ll never get enough of that mountain.

This time Mount Rainier was covered in all sorts of lenticular clouds that looked like UFOs hovering above us to take us away.

We headed up to Mazama Ridge and ambled along, oohing and aahing at the views, dropped down to Reflection Lake, and circled back up to Paradise. In the heat and wet, heavy, sloppy snow, hiking up the gently sloping Paradise Valley Road ended up feeling more tiring than rest-stepping up Aaron’s signature (or so I’ve gathered :D) steep hill earlier in the day. The good news is that the snow is melting and summer is on its way!

Perfect weather, beautiful views, and a great bunch of hikers. Regardless of what Dr. Phil has to say about it, meeting people from teh intarwebs just plain rules.

A thing that certainly does not rule is forgetting sunscreen. You would think I would have learned after burning my lips on our trip to Camp Muir a couple of weeks ago, but no. The day before this hike I spent the afternoon on a sailboat on Lake Washington with not a drop of sunscreen on my face, and on the hike I diligently applied and reapplied gunk all day but neglected to cover my ears, neck, chest, and, curiously, one thin, straight line down my nose. I am officially stupid and am paying for it by looking like a peeling Freddy Krueger.

This is a layout I made last summer for Computer Tricks for Scrapbooking 3, raving about wanting to really tackle my fear of heights. This winter I decided that since I had reached the point where I could walk along a cliff or hang around at the top of the rock wall in the gym, I was ready to take a mountaineering class. Hah.

Last weekend our class went to Spire Rock, an outside rock climbing wall about an hour south of Seattle, and it became painfully obvious that I wasn’t ready after all. As it turns out, climbing on smooth, worn, mossy rock outside while wearing stiff mountaineering boots is 374 (approximately) times as terrifying as climbing inside with rock shoes that will stick to anything and huge, luxurious hand holds. When it was time to try rappelling, I couldn’t even take the first step off the “cliff”. I just had this vision in my head that my foot would slip and I would bang into the wall.

I spent all week trying to prepare (both mentally and physically) for our next outing to Spire. The first thing I did when we got there was get up on that rock, set up my rappel, take the first step…and then slip and bang straight into the rock. I rappelled down (rappelling itself is fun; it’s just that nothing in my mind or body wants to take that first step) and got right back on the horse…and slipped again, really banging into the rock again (my knee is still swollen, magnificently multi-colored and painful as all hell when I bend it, whine whine whine).

The rock was ridiculously slick from being marinated in a couple of days of rain, so people kept slipping and sliding and flipping over all day, but it was over for me. I can’t join the class for the climbs if I am that uncomfortable on rock. Lame.

I’m trying very hard not to dwell on the fact that I failed at something yet again, and that it is ok that I’m scared of heights. It’s not something that absolutely needs to be fixed, and there is a lifetime of non-sphincter tightening hiking to be had in Washington. But as much as the heights bother me, I think what really screwed things up for me this time was trying to learn this stuff in a large group of people where I felt like I could never measure up. And that’s really not good.

Number one lesson learned from the class - I have the self-esteem of a (really really insecure) gnat. And I don’t know where to even begin to fix it.