A solo trip up Mailbox Peak.
It's interesting how sometimes it takes awhile for us to assimilate hobbies into our identities, to internalize the things we do as a part of us. Especially if they are things we didn't used to do, things we feel unsure of, that we think we have no right to claim as our own. I've always loved to read, it's easy to call myself a reader. I loved to travel for at least ten years, I call myself a traveler. But I haven't always loved to hike and I've only recently called myself a hiker. Let me tell you the story...
My hiking story picks up where my running story left off. Feeling brave from crushing (aka finishing without feeling like I was going to die) my second half marathon I started to take on the hills, peaks and mountains around Seattle. I spent a Saturday morning hiking Wallace Falls in the North Cascades alone, a Sunday with friends heading up to Annette Lake in Snoqualmie Pass, an afternoon on the Oregon Coast powering up Neahkahnie Mountain. I was tourist hiking, getting out into nature, seeing the sights. And then I heard that some friends of mine were planning to climb Mount Adams. In two weeks.
I've done some pretty epic hikes in my life, Machu Picchu being the most obvious example, I also took an amazing trip with friend Elena where we hiked three days in the Austrian Alps. But there was a world of difference between these multi-day hikes in warm weather and Mount Adams which you summit in one day and is snowy even in the summer. It was a completely different type of hiking, and actually a completely different blog post as this is the one is about me being awesome at hiking up Mailbox Peak. Adams was yet to come.
So here's the thing. Even though I'd done some big hikes I never liked the actual hiking itself. Going up was torture for me, I hated the feeling of being out of breath, of feeling my heart pound in my chest. Hiking was something to be endured in order to see the view at the top, to check the box on an adventure, but it was pure torture. I can still remember how relieved I felt after making it to the top of the third day of Machu Picchu and knowing I got to go DOWN from then on.
I should probably stick to a more linear narrative flow here, but I'm just so happy to be writing right now that I have a lot to say (no, that's not true, I love to write as if I'm having a conversation with the reader, and really no good conversation is linear). But, back to the point. I wanted to join my friends for Adams, but it was a real MOUNTAIN and I'd only been climbing hills. I needed a test to measure myself against, to make sure I really was ready. So that lead me to Mailbox Peak.
There is an 'old' way up the peak which takes you up 4,000 feet of elevation gain in 2.5 miles. For those of you who don't speak mountain climber, that's steep. You pretty much walk straight uphill the whole way. There is also a 'new' way to get there, which has a more gradual increase for the first 4 miles and then joins the old trail for an intense finish. Of course my challenge was to go up the old trail.
I took the afternoon off work, it was a Tuesday (it's not something I normally would do, but being laid off has a way of making hiking mountains more important than share reports). I drove out myself to the trail head, got lost, figured out where I was supposed to be and headed up the mountain. I knew the key would be steady movement. With this kind of thing there really isn't relief until you get to the top, so there isn't much point of stopping until you get there, you'll just delay your getting there. It was intense, but not impossible. I set my phone alarm for 30 minutes so I wouldn't constantly be thinking about stopping. I would take a break when it rang and until then I would be miserable.
Except that I wasn't. I was out of breath. My heart was pounding in my chest. I was sweaty AF. But I wasn't miserable. I had learned how to train for my half marathon. I had learned to enjoy the movement, feel the vitality of my blood pumping through my heart, the consistency of my breath, the strength in my muscles to keep going. It didn't hurt less, but somehow it hurt less.
I made it to the top in 2.5 hours. The hardest part, the 'old' trail took me about 1.5 hrs which was much quicker than I'd mentally prepared myself for so after I got past that I knew I could make it up whatever the rest brought me. The end was still difficult, exposed and in the sun as opposed to the shaded forest that the first portion climbed through, but I just didn't stop moving and I even passed people! They day was clear, the view from the top was stunning, but the reward was no longer the view from the top. It was the transformation from dreading the effort to enjoying the effort.
If you want to check out my next step on the journey to Mt Adams then skip ahead to my slushy experience hiking to Camp Muir.
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