Loowit (Mt. St. Helens) is not made of beautiful rock spires. It is not (in the summer, at least) covered in snow with dramatically windblown icy slopes leading to the summit. Loowit is made of dust. For anyone (like me before moving here) that missed the memo, this is because it is a volcano that... Continue Reading →
If you're not from Seattle, the familiarity of the mailbox is probably lost on you. But when I first hiked it on a visit to Seattle, before the new, less steep trail even existed, it was so steep my sedentary college body felt overheated, and I laid on the floor for a few hours. The... Continue Reading →
I'm writing about 100 great peaks in the northwest. The full list is here. There's a special type of rock in Wenatchee, towering and dramatic walls of solid granite that are as beautiful as they are solid. This climber's playground is filled with precariously balanced rocks and pillars that look like castle turrets. So much... Continue Reading →
I'm writing about 100 peaks I think are rad. Here's the full list so far. Also, for examples of other subtle sexism, this is hilarious and eye-opening. When I was first reading about Sahale, I saw multiple forum posts where it was called a "girlfriend climb" or something similar, implying it's easy to take your... Continue Reading →
When we got to the top of Mt. Stuart last year, we were basking in the excitement that we could climb something so prominent in one day and with no technical skills. Climbing something so obviously massive, the 6th highest peak in Washington, as inexperienced climbers, seemed to make all of us feel like we... Continue Reading →
It was dark, and Westy was digging out a rock in the ground with his ice axe. He scraped around with his hands to find the edges. It took ages to shake loose a toaster-sized rock in the way of the front tire. I tried to stay out of axe-to-head range and looked again at... Continue Reading →
Kulshan is a friendly-looking trapezoid with a smooth snowy appearance from the direction of Seattle. Fittingly, this is the training ground for many beginner mountaineers and is the graduation climb for the largest mountaineering club in the area, The Mountaineers, as well as many others. It's accessible, has a ski lodge, and has tons of... Continue Reading →
I woke up on a tiny rocky ledge overlooking a sunrise. The air was almost-pleasant in its coldness, the rocks had made me aware of specific parts of my back, and I blinked through the haze in my eyes at the upside-down wash of peachy colors and layers of increasingly distant blue mountains like fragile... Continue Reading →
"Why should I climb it? Why does anyone actually care about getting to the top of things?" That's an actual thing I said, about the haystack on top of Mt. Si, around five years ago on one of my first visits to Seattle. I was visiting my partner, Wade, while I was still in college,... Continue Reading →
